CCNA, CCNP, MCSA, CCNA Final Exam, All Answer Test Module With 100/100

What's better practice when defining several methods that return the same shape of data with different filters? Explicit method names or overloaded methods? For example. If I have some Products and I'm pulling from a database explicit way: public List<Product> GetProduct(int productId) { // return a List } public List<Product> GetProductByCategory(Category category) { // return a List } public List<Product> GetProductByName(string Name ) { // return a List } overloaded way: public List<Product> GetProducts() { // return a List of all products } public List<Product> GetProducts(Category category) { // return a List by Category } public List<Product> GetProducts(string searchString ) { // return a List by search string } I realize you may get into a problem with similar signatures , but if you're passing objects instead of base types (string, int, char, DateTime, etc) this will be less of an issue. So... i

I'm talking about methods like this: $object->method()->method1('param')->method2('param'); Those are created by returning the object in the function. return $this; I've seen third-party software use that method, but I'm wondering, wouldn't that cause a bit of a problem with the resources or memory because you're continuously returning the entire object?