(except for proxy setup!)
I spent some time writing a question here regarding a better pattern for a problem I had - of a class that performed some conditional initialization on almost every property getter, since the initialization in the base class relied on data from the inheriting classes that wasn't available on construction.
While writing the question I came to the conclusion it would be better practice to initialize on inheritor construction. This would require every inheriting class to call the parents initialization method, but I think it's better, because:
- I don't have to remember to initialize in the base class on every new property getter/setter.
- I don't accidentally trigger the initialization while debugging (see my question here)
If you ever had code that changes state in a property getter, do you think it's absolutely justified? Can you give an example for such a case? (Or even describe the pattern?)
I could only think of proxy access, where you don't want to perform initialization until property access...
Somebody suggested that I initialize using a factory/static method - that's actually a good idea (when the construction is simple, a bit harder when it's not uniform across inheriting classes), but the answer was deleted before I had a chance to submit my reply. too bad.