I'm building a Librarian module -- it has a couple of methods for basic object creation, getting, setting and cleanup. These objects are actually used to access documents in a file system.

So far I have a new method that creates a new object with a supplied name if that name is available. If the name's not available, the new method fails.

I'm doing development by testing, so as I add more code I write tests, and continue when the tests pass. It's a very neat way to develop code, but now I want to add tests that try to access an object that already exists, and the current new method won't allow that -- so I've figured I want to write an init method that will also be a method constructor, but only for names that already exist.

Obviously there's some common functionality between the two methods .. I'm not concerned about that. But is there a usual and customary naming convention or approach to do this in Object Oriented Programming?

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Determining what new and init methods do by talexb

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