Generic Methods

Abstract

Generic methods are the methods used to access the attributes of an object. The concept behind the need for generic methods is encapsulation, in which attributes associated with an object can be accessed directly only by the methods within the object itself. Therefore, each time an attribute is created within an object, we will need generic methods to access the attribute. This is the main difference between the standard relational techniques for implementing operations vs. the object-oriented methods. In relational databases, users normally can directly access attributes of a table by running SQL statements to update, delete, or insert. This may generate problems when certain attributes within an object have some constraints applied to them, and therefore the ad hoc access may violate these constraints.