28 Aug 2018

Encapsulation Vs. Abstraction

TLDR;

Encapsulation his defined ‘as the process of enclosing one or more items within a physical or logical package’. Encapsulation, in object oriented programming methodology, prevents access to implementation details.

Abstraction is used to display only necessary and essential features of an object to ouside the world.

Encapsulation

Encapsulation is used to refer to one of two related but distinct notions, and sometimes to the combination thereof:

A language mechanism for restricting direct access to some of the object’s components. (Information Hiding)
A language construct that facilitates the bundling of data with the methods (or other functions) operating on that data

The object-oriented principle of Encapsulation helps avoid problems by allowing you to hide internal state and abstract access to it through type members such as methods, properties, and indexers. Encapsulation helps you reduce coupling between objects and increases the maintainability of your code.

Encapsulation is implemented by using access specifiers. An access specifier defines the scope and visibility of a class member. C# supports the following access specifiers:

Public
- Any code. No inheritance, external type, or external assembly restrictions.
Private
- Only members within the same type. (default for type members)
Protected
- Only derived types or members of the same type.
Internal
- Only code within the same assembly. Can also be code external to object as long as it is in the same assembly. (default for types)
Protected internal
- Either code from derived type or code in the same assembly. Combination of protected OR internal.

Abstraction

Abstraction and encapsulation are related features in object oriented programming. But abstraction can be simple defined by ‘showing what is necessary’.

Abstraction is a mechanism to show only relevant data to the user and encapsulation is the process of hiding irrelevant data from the user.

class program
{
    abstract class animal
    {
        public abstract void eat();
        public void sound()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("dog can sound");
        }
    }
    class dog : animal
    {
        public override void eat() {
            Console.WriteLine("dog can eat");
        }
    }
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        dog mydog = new dog();
        animal thePet = mydog;
        thePet.eat();
        mydog.sound();
    }
}
/* Output
    dog can eat
    dog can sound
*/

References

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