Getters and setters provide a way to enforce encapsulation by providing public
methods that give controlled access to
private
fields. However in classes with multiple fields it is not unusual that copy and paste is used to quickly create the needed
getters and setters, which can result in the wrong field being accessed by a getter or setter.
This rule raises an issue in any of these cases:
class A { private int x; private int y; public void setX(int val) { // Noncompliant: field 'x' is not updated this.y = val; } public int getY() { // Noncompliant: field 'y' is not used in the return value return this.x; } }
class A { private int x; private int y; public void setX(int val) { this.x = val; } public int getY() { return this.y; } }