Question

Say I have a method that returns a business object:

public static MyObject GetObject()
{
   return Blah.Blah();
}

Now I need another method that does the same thing, but returns MyObject in an XML format:

public static string GetObject(bool returnXml)
{
  return Blah.Blah.Xml();
}

I started with this approach, but soon realized that caller could specify false for returnXml.

Is my only option to rename my method to something like GetObjectAsXml?

---

Update…thanks all.

My original methods look like this.

public static MyObject GetObject()
{
   return ConvertToMyObject(GetResponseAsXML());
}

I just need a new set of methods that look like this:

public static string GetObject()
{
   return GetResponseAsXML();
}

From the answers it seems like the best way is to have a second set of methods that are named GetObjectAsXML, right? I don’t really want to do GetObject().ToXml() because I want to return the original response back.

Answer 1

I’m not sure why you would overload the same method here.

One is returning the object, the other is returning an XML representation/serialization of that object. I’d use two different methods.

What’s more interesting is what you do with these objects and XML serializations; the consumer would probably want 2 overloads that take either type as a parameter, but that would be dependent on your needs.