Collection Access Best Practices

[treespace]

I want a persistent collection but I do not want anybody accessing the collection directly. So rather than getProtons you might call addProton:

@Entity class Atom
{
 ...
 public void addProton(Proton proton)
 {
 protons.add(proton);
 proton.setAtom(this);
 }

 public List getProtons() ...
 ...

Can my getProtons... property method be declared private? Use of the encapsulated collection access methods cannot otherwise be enforced.

[instinct]

ejb-3_0-pfd-spec-persistence.pdf wrote:

If the entity has field-based access, the persistence provider runtime accesses instance variables directly.

If the persistence provider does not use the getters and setters I don't see why your accessor methods should not be declared private.

I changed

public Collection<Contact> getContact() {
 return contact;
}

to

private Collection<Contact> getContact() {
 return contact;
}