Is it bad practice for a module to contain more information than it needs?
- by gekod
I just wanted to ask for your opinion on a situation that occurs sometimes and which I don't know what would be the most elegant way to solve it.
Here it goes:
We have module A which reads an entry from a database and sends a request to module B containing ONLY the information from the entry module B would need to accomplish it's job (to keep modularity I just give it the information it needs - module B has nothing to do with the rest of the information from the read DB entry). Now after finishing it's job, module B has to reply to a module C if it succeeded or failed. To do this module B replies with the information it has gotten from module A and some variable meaning success or fail. Now here comes the problem: module C needs to find that entry again BUT the information it has gotten from module B is not enough to uniquely find the exact same entry again.
I don't think that module A giving more information to module B which it doesn't need to do it's job but which it could then give back to module C would be a good practice because this would mean giving some module information it doesn't really need.
What do you think?