How many constructors should a class have?

Question

I\'m currently modifying a class that has 9 different constructors. Now overall I believe this class is very poorly designed... so I\'m wondering if it is poor design for a clas

Answer 1

Your problem isn't the number of constructors. Having 9 constructors is more than usual, but I don't think it is necessarily wrong. It's certainly not the source of your problem. The real problem is that the initial design was all static methods. This is really a special case of the classes being too tightly coupled. The now-failing classes are bound to the idea that the functions are static. There isn't much you can do about that from the class in question. If you want to make this class non-static, you'll have to undo all that coupling that was written into the code by others. Modify the class to be non-static and then update all of the callers to instantiate a class first (or get one from a singleton). One way to find all of the callers is to make the functions private and let the compiler tell you.

At 6000 lines, the class is not very cohesive. It's probably trying to do too much. In a perfect world you would refactor the class (and those calling it) into several smaller classes.