Is it bad practice to have my getter method change the stored value?

Question

Is it bad practice to change my getter method like version 2 in my class.

Version 1:

 public String getMyValue(){
     return this.myValue
 }
         


        

Answer 1

In my opinion, unless you are doing lazy-loading (which you are not in that case), getters should not change the value. So I would either:

Put the change in the setter

public void setMyValue(String value) {
    if(value == null || value.isEmpty()){
        this.myValue = "N/A";
    } else {
        this.myValue = value;
    }
}

Or make the getter return a default value if value not set properly:

public String getMyValue() {
    if(this.myvalue == null || this.myvalue.isEmpty()){
        return "N/A";
    }    
    return this.myValue;
}

In the case of lazy-loading, where I would say that changing your members in a getter is fine, you would do something like:

public String getMyValue() {
    if (this.myvalue == null) {
        this.myvalue = loadMyValue();
    }    
    return this.myValue;
}