What does Mutator mean?
A mutator, in the context of C#, is a method, with a public level of accessibility, used to modify and control the value of a private member variable of a class. The mutator is used to assign a new value to the private field of a type. It forms a tool to implement encapsulation by only controlling access to the internal field values that must be modified.
The benefits of using a mutator include:
- Prevents the user from directly accessing the private data of an object instance and allows access only through public methods to prevent data corruption.
- Provides flexibility in modifying the internal representation of the fields of an object that represents the internal state without breaking the interface used by the object's clients.
- Ability to include additional processing logic like validation of a values set, triggering of events, etc., during the modification of the field in the mutator.
- Provides the synchronization that is necessary for multithreading scenarios.
- Includes a provision to override the mutator declared in a base class with the code in the derived class.