Question

I am currently working on a single activity Android app that uses a lot of shared UI objects (like Button, etc). At the moment, I have these UI objects declared as private non-static class variables. The alternative to this would be to continually pass the objects from method to method and modify them that way. It is currently unclear to me which option should be preferred, as it seems to me that using the maximum encapsulation form would cause me to do quite a bit of argument passing. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Answer 1

Generally I like to think of encapsulation as hiding data within a single class. If multiple methods are accessing that object within the class, that doesn’t really violate encapsulation principles. Once you start leaking it outside the class, that’s when encapsulation problems occur.

With that said, it is perfectly fine to have a private member which is a Button and multiple methods can access that button.