A design problem I met again and again.

[一首诗]

That's clever.  I never thought of that.  Not only something concrete,
like people, could be class, but a procedure, like a Session, could
also be a Class.

Thanks for you all who replied.  I learned a lot from this thread and
I even made some notes of all your advices because I think I might
review them many times in my future work.

On Apr 4, 12:10 pm, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 2, 11:25 pm, 一首诗 <newpt... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Consolidate existing functions?
>
> > I've thought about it.
>
> > For example, I have two functions:
>
> > #=========================
>
> > def startXXX(id):
> >     pass
>
> > def startYYY(id):
> >     pass
> > #=========================
>
> > I could turn it into one:
>
> > #=========================
> > def start(type, id):
> >     if(type == "XXX"):
> >         pass
> >     else if(type == "YYY"):
> >         pass
> > #=========================
>
> > But isn't the first style more clear for my code's user?
>
> Not necessarily, especially if the user wants to dynamically choose
> which start*** function to call.
>
> I have one more suggestion.  Consider whether there are groups of
> methods that are used together but aren't used with other groups of
> functions.  For instance, maybe there is a group of methods that can
> only be called after a call to startXXX.  If that's the case, you
> might want to separate those groups into different classes.  The
> branched-off class would then act as a sort of session handler.
>
> A piece of user code that looked like this (where sc is an instance of
> your enormous class):
>
> sc.startX()
> sc.send_data_via_X()
> sc.receive_data_via_X()
> sc.stopX()
>
> might look like this after you factor it out:
>
> session = sc.startX()  # creates and returns a new XSession object
> session.send_data()    # these are methods of the XSession
> session.receive_data()
> session.stop()
>
> Any methods that are callable any time, you can retain in the big
> class, or put in a base class of all the sessions.
>
> Carl Banks