Introduction
The object oriented programming will give the impression very unnatural to a programmer with a lot of procedural programming experience. In Object Oriented programming Encapsulation is the first pace. Encapsulation is the procedure of covering up of data and functions into a single unit (called class). An encapsulated object is often called an abstract data type. In this article let us see about it in a detailed manner.
Need For Encapsulation:
The need of encapsulation is to protect or prevent the code (data) from accidental corruption due to the silly little errors that we are all prone to make. In Object oriented programming data is treated as a critical element in the program development and data is packed closely to the functions that operate on it and protects it from accidental modification from outside functions.
Encapsulation provides a way to protect data from accidental corruption. Rather than defining the data in the form of public, we can declare those fields as private. The Private data are manipulated indirectly by two ways. Let us see some example programs in C# to demonstrate Encapsulation by those two methods. The first method is using a pair of conventional accessor and mutator methods. Another one method is using a named property. Whatever be the method our aim is to use the data with out any damage or change.
Encapsulation Using Accessors And Mutators:
Let us see an example of Department class. To manipulate the data in that class (String departname) we define an accessor (get method) and mutator (set method).
Encapsulation Using Properties:
Properties are a new language feature introduced with C#. Only a few languages support this property. Properties in C# helps in protect a field in a class by reading and writing to it. The first method itself is good but Encapsulation can be accomplished much smoother with properties.
The Encapsulation is the first footstep towards the object-oriented programming. This article gives you a little bit information about Encapsulation. Using accessor and mutator methods we can make encapsulation. Another one method is using a named property. The benefit of properties is that the users of your objects are able to manipulate the internal data point using a single named item.