Question

I’m currently working on an objective c project, and have a method that enables/disables OR in another term: activates/deactivates a global HTTP proxy. I was wondering what is the best naming convention for such a method. The method has a BOOL argument to decide which operation to carry out, ie: enable OR disable. It is a style question which is relevant to most programming languages and i’ve decided I would love the input of this great community on this matter which is bothering me for some reason.

Is this good ? anything better or clearer ?

-(BOOL) activate:(BOOL) theActivateFlag;

or

-(BOOL) enable:(BOOL) theEnableFlag;

Will calling [proxyObj activate:NO] OR [proxyObj enable:NO] be understood as deactivating the proxy ?
Thx 🙂

Answer 1

I like form to reflect function in my code

At the top of the file I’d put a

#define DISABLED NO
#define ENABLED YES

and have my function be

- (void)toggleProxyAs:(BOOL)state {
    // assuming enabled is property/instance variable
    enabled = state;
}

and use it as

[myProxyObj toggleProxyAs:ENABLED];

This isn’t the standard way of doing things, but for me it is clearer and eliminates the need for separate activators/deactivators.