textBoxEmployeeName vs employeeNameTextBox

Question

Which naming convention do you use and why?

I like to use employeeNameTextBox, because:

• It seems more natural from an English language perspective.

Answer 1

Naming your variables is so important. Thick client view conventions seem to be given the short end of the stick. Here are my thoughts:

1. Never put getters and setters for actual business values on your view. Don't do this:

   public Name EmployeeName { get; set; }
   

2. To get or set an EmployeeName, your stateful code should explicitly call a method. Do it this way because it projects that the state is not stored on the view, but can be derived from or transposed to the view:

   public void SetEmployeeName(Name employeeName);
   public Name GetEmployeeName();
   

3. Hungarian notation is stupid. It was useful in languages <= VB6 because they used late binding of variable types. You had to protect yourself because type mismatches were runtime errors, not compile time. Only use txtEmployeeName if you also would use strEmployeeName and intEmployeeNumber.

4. If prefixing the pattern name isn't consistent with your naming convention, don't do it for the control type (which represents a pattern). If you wouldn't create a commandNameFormatting (instead of nameFormattingComamnd), then don't create a textBoxEmployeeName.

5. You'll probably need a suffix of some sort, since EmployeeName doesn't sufficiently describe the variable's purpose. An EmployeeName text box's purpose is to receive input. You could call it EmployeeNameTextBox if that makes you comfortable, but it might be better to call it EmployeNameInput. This has the added bonus that if you have a label, it's clear that EmployeeNamePrompt (or EmployeeNameLabel) is not the same as the text box. Without some sort of descriptive suffix, you don't have a good way to differentiate.