Question

Which is the better approach

public class Account
{
  public UserAccount GetUserDetails(string acctId)
  {
    return new UserAccount().GetDetails(); //call method from class UserAccount
  }

  public UserAccount GetUserDetails(string acctId)
  {
    return new UserOtherDetails().GetDetails(); //call method from another class
  }
}

or contain the class like this

public class Account
{
  private UserAccount userAccount; //contain UserAccount class
  private UserOtherDetails userOtherDetails;

  public UserAccount GetUserDetails(string acctId)
  {
    return userAccount.GetDetails(); //invoke the method from UserAccount class
  }

  public UserOtherDetails GetOtherDetails(string acctId)
  {
    return new userOtherDetails().GetDetails(); //call method from another class
  }
}

or any other approach guys?

EDIT: what if I Add parameters on the method?

Additional: My point here is I don’t want to instantiate UserOtherDetails class when I’m calling the GetUserDetails Method

Answer 1

You second approach is better. The first approach is nasty because everytime you call GetUserDetails a new instance of the UserAccount class will be created.

You could also just expose this as a property

public class Account
{
  public UserAccount Details {get; private set;}
}

Here is an example

public class Account 
{ 
  public UserAccount UserDetails {get; private set;}
  public UserOtherDetails OtherDetails {get; private set;} 

  public Account (UserAccount userDetails, UserOtherDetails otherDetails)
  {
    this.UserDetails = userDetails;
    this.OtherDetails = otherDetails;
  }
} 

The above assumes you have already loaded the UserDetails and UserOtherDetails. If you want to load the details on demand then you might do something like this.

public class Account 
{ 
  private UserAccount _userDetails;
  private UserOtherDetails _otherDetails;

  public GetUserAccountDetails(string accountId)
  {
    if (_userDetails == null)
    {
      // This could be a nice place to look at various factory patterns.
      _userDetails = new UserAccount();
      _userDetails.Load(accountId);
    }
    return _userDetails;
  }

  ...
}