Question

What’s the best way to call a class constructor that can have lots of parameters associated with it?

For instance, if I want to develop a component to automatically log exceptions in an application; let’s call it ‘ExceptionLogger’

ExceptionLogger has 3 ways of of writing the errors generated by the application that references it.

ToLogFile              (takes 2 parameters)
ToDatabase             (takes 2 parameters)
ToEmail                (take 4 parameters)

Each of these 3 methods are private to ExceptionLogger and the calling application needs to ‘turn on’ these methods through the class constuctor; also supplying the parameters if required.

The calling app would simply use a ‘publish’ method to have ExceptionLogger write the information to the relevant storage.

To add a clarification; it’s my intenttion for a single ExceptionLogger instance to be able to do multiple writes

Answer 1

It seems like this might be a good place to use inheritance instead. You could have a FileLogger, DatabaseLogger, and EmailLogger each of which derives from a base ExceptionLogger class and has a single appropriate constructor.