VBA Classes and Solid Programming Principles

Source: VBA Class Modules: gateway to SOLID code – Rubberduck News (wordpress.com)

Creating Custom Types

You may have already used a user-defined type (UDT), which is a convenient way to create a structure of closely related properties together. You may have used it before especially if you’ve ever had to use certain API functions via the Declare statements. Let’s start with a Person UDT. We can create a new standard module and define a UDT within the module:

Public Type Person
  FirstName As String
  LastName As String
  BirthDate As Date
End Type

The UDT provides us with 3 members that tells us something about a Person; namely the first & last name and the birth date. Obviously, we can have more but we want the example to stay simple. The calling code to use a Person UDT could look something like this:

Public Sub Test()
  Dim p1 As Person
  Dim p2 As Person

  p1.FirstName = "John"
  p1.LastName = "Smith"
  p1.BirthDate = #1970-01-01#

  p2.FirstName = "Jane"
  p2.LastName = "Doe"
  p2.BirthDate = #1970-01-01#

  Debug.Print VarPtr(p1), VarPtr(p2)
End Sub

Create First Class Module

image-8.png (171×120) (wordpress.com)

The very first thing we want to do with our first class is to define the private data it needs to have to work correctly. We could start with nothing but public fields, like this:

Public FirstName As String
Public LastName As String
Public BirthDate As Date

We could use Property statements instead. If you’ve never used one before, they are a way to provide a procedural access to a member of the data structure, which grants us additional control on how the property may be accessed. We could revise the code accordingly:

Private mFirstName As String
Private mLastName As String
Private mBirthDate As Date

Public Property Get FirstName() As String
  FirstName = mFirstName
End Property

Public Property Let FirstName(NewValue As String)
  mFirstName = FirstName
End Property

Public Property Get LastName() As String
  LastName = mLastName
End Property

Public Property Let LastName(NewValue As String)
  mLastName = LastName
End Property

Public Property Get BirthDate() As String
  BirthDate = mBirthDate
End Property

Public Property Let BirthDate(NewValue As String)
  mBirthDate = BirthDate
End Property

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