What are better ways to create a method that takes many arguments? (10+?)

Question

I was looking at some code of a fellow developer, and almost cried. In the method definition there are 12 arguments. From my experience..this isn't good. If it were me, I would have sent in an object of some sort.

Is there another / more preferred way to do this (in other words, what's the best way to fix this and explain why)?

public long Save (
    String today, 
    String name, 
    String desc, 
    int ID, 
    String otherNm, 
    DateTime dt, 
    int status, 
    String periodID, 
    String otherDt, 
    String submittedDt
)

ignore my poor variable names - they are examples

Answer 1

It highly depends on the language.

In a language without compile-time typechecking (e.g. python, javascript, etc.) you should use keyword arguments (common in python: you can access them like a dictionary passed in as an argument) or objects/dictionaries you manually pass in as arguments (common in javascript).

However the "argument hell" you described is sometimes "the right way to do things" for certain languages with compile-time typechecking, because using objects will obfuscate the semantics from the typechecker. The solution then would be to use a better language with compile-time typechecking which allows pattern-matching of objects as arguments.

Answer 2

Yes, use objects. Also, the function is probably doing too much if it needs all of this information, so use smaller functions.

Answer 3

Use objects.

class User { ... }
User user = ...
Save(user);

It decision provides easy way for adding new parameters.