I have a class with a bunch of fields, all private (subclasses access a few with protected getters). I need to pass most of those fields into a method in another class that will format them and generate output. Is it ok to have a method in the class with the fields that'll pass them all across? Or do these circumstances suggest that I should implement some other relationship between the two classes, as they seem closely coupled because of this?
Further information: class A represents Employees, class B's only responsibility is to format the output of the program.
Best Answer
Are you asking if it is OK to do the following?
That's perfectly OK.
Marking a field as private just means that only the containing class should be able to access it...
If you mean something else it's best to pop some code in your question to give people the context
OK, so there's no way to set the values here but you can see here two different ways to call the formatter. When the parameter list gets past three or four items then it gets difficult to read.
In this instance I'd just pass A into the formatter and have a get method for each value you want B to be able to read.