HEXTERIA HELPER CODE

Naming things is one of the hard problems in computer science. Thus, it is overly vague and nebulous, and not well-suited for the purpose of informing the user what the object does. 'Helper,' could mean many kinds of relationships. Or it may itself be too vague - this is at the discretion of the namer.īut as we have seen, the name, 'helper,' doesn't aid in understanding what is going on in the code, other than it is ancillary to the main object of interest. 'Implementation' may be correct as the implementation may do too much to give it a more precise name. class Widget:Įven in this case, with this small amount of information we have an improvement on 'helper.' It would be more descriptive to call it some generic name like 'WidgetImplementation.' Or perhaps we delete 'Helper' from the name and additionally rename Widget to something like WidgetImplementation.Īlternatively, it could be wrapped and called by the widget, implying it is not part of the public API, but rather part of the implementation details. In this case, something like 'WidgetAPI' would be a better name, because that, at least, informs the user its relationship to the Widget class. The implication is that WidgetHelper in this pseudocode example is part of the public API: class WidgetHelper:

HEXTERIA HELPER CODE

It is my experience that this might not even actually be true, and one might delete 'helper' from the name and improve the communication.įor another possibility, 'WidgetHelper' could be wrapping the widget, such that the widget code itself may know nothing about the helper. What do we learn from the name? We know the object or function does some kind of work secondary to the widget. Suppose we see the name 'WidgetHelper' (here 'widget' is a stand-in name for any sort of programmable functionality, and not necessarily a UI widget): class WidgetHelper: In fact I consider it to be a code smell that indicates more problems underneath. Every time I have seen it used I have found it to be a suboptimal name.

However, it communicates very little about what it does. Helper is a commonly used name appendage. Return Regex.IsMatch(s, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase) public static int FindRep(char chr, string str, int beginPos, int endPos)įor (pos = beginPos pos <= endPos pos++)Īnd here is an example of a bad helper: public static class DutchZipcodeHelper The helper method is very simple, but very inconvenient to copy-paste around and the framework does not provide any solution. digits = digits.Remove(0, TextHelper.FindRep('0', digits, 0, digits.Length - 2)) Here is an example of a harmless helper, I use a method called FindRep that counts the number of leading zeros. When it does the contrary, then it indicates bad design because the code has been excluded from its authority, if there is any authority at all. I would break up such classes along the lines of related behaviour that logically group together, and then rename the new classes to reflect what it does.Ī helper is a harmless additional class or method, as long as it complements an external component. It is undescriptive, and gives you no real inkling of what sort of operations the class does (it helps?), which also means that it's not obvious when adding new behaviours whether they belong in the Helper class or not. In addition to this, as you have already identified SomethingSomethingHelper is actually a terrible name. This failure to package the behaviour with the data it acts on is why developers so often (in my experience) fail to find it. Successive developers have then come onto the project and not realised that the helper class exists, and have consequently rewritten the same common operations, or even created more Helper classes.īut seriously, the main problem with Helper classes is that they are usually operations that act on a specific class, which obviously means in OO terms that they are suffering from an acute case of Feature Envy.

A Helper class is a lesser known code smell where a coder has identified some miscellaneous, commonly used operations and attempted to make them reusable by lumping them together in an unnatural grouping.

Hexteria helper