Question

I just finished coding a class, and realized that all of its public functionality is encapsulated in a single method. It has no properties, no shared resources, and requires no constructor overload and handles disposal of anything it uses. It looks something like this:

public class ReportGenerator
{
    public string GenerateReport(List<SomeClass> stuffToReportOn)
    {
        string fileName = String.Empty;
        using(var reportDs = CreateDataSet(stuffToReportOn))
        {
            //do the stuff with the third party tool that 
            //creates the report.
            //Construct the filename.
            //Save the report.
        }
        return fileName;
    }

    private TypedDataSetRequiredByThirdPartyLib CreateDataSet(List<SomeClass> reportItems)
    {
        //create the dataset, calling two other private methods
        //to build the tables/rows
    }
}

After I finished refactoring it, I realized that this class could be entirely static. My question is, should it? Should a class that encapsulates all of its functionality in one public method be made static?

Answer 1

No. and what are the expected benefits?

Far more important is the potential for errors. If in your class you declare a static variable, it’ll only get initialised once, its value will persist and each call will potentially behave differently. Easily over-looked, this can be difficult to debug.