Other Conventions

Class Properties

In this guide, many references are made to the "properties" of a class. Properties are typically not made available directly to the programmer as member variables of the class, but are instead accessed through methods on the class. So, the property is a value which an instance of the class has and which may be read from the object or assigned to the object by making method calls. For example, when this documentation describes a class as having a property "foo", the way to access this property will be to call the "getFoo()" method of the class and to update the property you would call the "setFoo()" method. If a property accepts multiple values, then to update the property you can use the add<singular-propertyname> or set<plural-propertyname> methods to modify this property (e.g. for a Topic, you can use addSubjectIndicator() or setSubjectIndicators() to modify the subjectIndicators property of that class).