How should I name this method? [closed]

Question

I am designing the API for a service that deals with Job entities. I need to retrieve jobs given a status. So, I ended up naming my methods like so:

List<Job> getJobsByStatus(JobStatus status);

A while later I realised that I also need to be able to retrieve jobs which don't belong to a given status. Say, I want to retrieve all but the closed jobs.

I have been unable to think of a suitable and intuitive name for this method.

I thought of the below but don't quite find them right.

List<Job> getJobsAllButStatus(JobStatus status);
List<Job> getJobsNotStatus(JobStatus status);

I can't use a specific status such as closed and christen my method getAllButClosedJobs because my method will be a generic one capable of handling any status.

PS: I hope this question belongs to SO though it is not technically programming. Otherwise, please feel free to migrate it to a suitable site.

Answer 1

List<Job> getJobsExcludingStatus(JobStatus status);

or even

List<Job> getJobsExcluding(JobStatus status);

.......

And for good measure here's why you shouldn't use a boolean parameter. Say you had an interface like this:

List<Job> getJobs(JobStatus status, boolean exclude);

then imagine code that reads like this:

List<Job> jobLIst = getJobs(status, false);

How is anyone meant to know how that works? They'd have to dig inside the method to find out that false was a switch for including or excluding or whatever. The if statement that would be inside the method implmentation is hiding two methods in your API - one that does the true case and the other that does the false case. Typing isn't the bottleneck in software development - it's the thinking.

Answer 2

List<Job> Jobs.allWith(JobStatus... status);
List<Job> Jobs.allBut(JobStatus... status);

Combination of fluent api and varargs