Method Overloading. Can you overuse it?

Question

What\'s better practice when defining several methods that return the same shape of data with different filters? Explicit method names or overloaded methods?

For exa

Answer 1

I have seen overloading overused when you have only subtle differences in the arguments to the method. For example:

public List GetProduct(int productId) { // return a List  }
public List GetProduct(int productId, int ownerId ) { // return a List  }
public List GetProduct(int productId, int vendorId, boolean printInvoice) { // return a List  }

In my small example, it quickly becomes unclear if the second int argument should be the owner or customer id.