Logic in get part of property. Good practice?

Question

When databinding my xaml to some data I often use the "get" part of a property to do some logic. Like giving to sum of totals of a list or a check if something is positive.

For example:

public List<SomeClass> ListOfSomeClass{get;set;}

public double SumOfSomeClass
{
  get
  {
    return ListOfSomeClass.Sum(s => s.Totals);
  }
}

public bool SumPositive
{
  get
  {
    if(SumOfSomeClass >= 0)
      return true;
    else
      return false;
  }
}

This way I can bind to SumPositive and SumOfSomeClass. Is this considered good practice? Even if it gets more complex than this? Or would it be better call a method and return the outcome? What about calls to another class or even a database?

Answer 1

Property getters are expected to be fast and idempotent (i.e. no destructive actions should be performed there). Though it's perfectly fine to iterate over an in-memory collection of objects, I wouldn't recomment doing any kind of heavy lifting in either get or set parts. And speaking of iterating, I'd still cache the result to save a few milliseconds.