Constructor with all class properties or default constructor with setters?

Question

Following are the two approaches:

• constructor with all the class properties

Pros: I have to put an exact number of types of parameters so if I m

Answer 1

I prefer taking constructor arguments, for the aforementioned immutability reasons. If that gives you a constructor that takes lots of arguments (say more than four or so), that's a code smell to me: some of those arguments should be bundled together into their own types.

For example, if you have something like this:

class Contact
{
    public Contact(string firstName, string lastName, string phoneNumber,
        string street, string city, string state, int zipCode) { ... }
}

I'd refactor it to:

class Contact
{
    public Contact(Person person, PhoneNumber number, Address address) { ... }
}

class Person
{
    public Person(string firstName, string lastName) { ... }
}

class PhoneNumber
{
    public PhoneNumber(string digits) { ... }
}

class Address
{
    public Address(string street, string city, string state, int zipCode) { ... }
}

Too-large classes are a really common design problem in OOP codebases.