Question

Say I have an class which has three states: full screen, windowed, and minimized. The state of my object is stored as an enumerated type,

typedef enum {
    StateFullScreen,
    StateWindowed,
    StateMinimized
} State;

If every time I change the State, I am calling two methods: setState: and showState:, should I couple these actions into one? For example, override the normal synthesized setState: method and have it depending on the state call the proper showState: method? Or should I do it the other way around having showState: call setState:?

Are either of these good programming practice when it comes to object-oriented design?

Answer 1

In my opinion it would be better to do all the work in setState, this is what someone using your class would expect.

I have a session class, which has statusses connecting, disconnecting, online and offline. If I call setStatus it will also call a delegate method and disconnect the session if the new status is equalto disconnecting or offline.