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In the last lecture we set up, our scripter will object and we created this string question variable

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to hold our question text.

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And in the process we gave it a serialized filled attribute which allowed us to change it in the inspector.

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But when we come to write our quiz script later on, we're going to need to gain access to this variable

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or the data contained within this variable.

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So how do we go about doing that?

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Well, for this, we use a certain type of method that is commonly called a getter method, because

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it allows us to get the data within a private variable and return it to a different script.

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So let's go in a bit of a deeper understanding of what a getter method is and why we would use it.

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Well, I guess a method will give a script from outside of our class read only access to a private variable.

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So for our script to object, we mentioned that we didn't want other classes manipulating the data in

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our variable and this will help protect the contents of that private variable on our disk.

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So pretty straightforward from a description point of view.

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But let's have a look at how we would write it.

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So let's create a new method in our script to object, and we're going to call this get question.

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However, up until this point in the course, we've only used a very specific type of method where we

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would maybe have something like public void get question.

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But this doesn't allow us to get the question and return it to another script, because as we can see

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from our declaration here, it is public, so it will be visible from other scripts, but it's got a

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return type of void and this means it doesn't return anything.

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For our question, though, we want it to return a string back to another script.

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So what we can do here is instead of having void, we can have a public string get question.

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And this will now expect the method to return a string.

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As we can see at the moment, we're getting a red squiggly on our method name because it says that not

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all code paths return a value.

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So unlike a void method where we don't ever return anything, we just perform some logic in here.

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In this case, we need to return something back from the method and we can do that using the return

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keyword.

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And what do we want to return?

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What we want to return the question.

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So this will now give us that read only access that we're looking for.

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We have our private string question variable.

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We've given it some amount of write access with our serialized field so we can edit it in the inspector.

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But when it comes to other classes accessing this variable, they're going to have to go through this

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get question method and this will then return a copy of that question data.

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Now hopefully that's all making sense, but to really illustrate the point, what I'm going to do is

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I'm going to make a second class in this script and you don't have to follow along with this.

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This is purely to show you how this might work later on in the course.

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If I make a public class and we'll call this test and we can have multiple classes within the same script,

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which can be really handy for testing if I was to get a reference to this question script table object.

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And just call it my question.

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So.

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If I then made a fairly standard generic void method.

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So we're just going to call this test as well because it really doesn't matter for the moment.

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If I was to access this question, S0 and use the DOT operator to see what variables and methods I have

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access to, if I try and type question, I won't have access to my question variable up at the top here.

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But you may have noticed that that I do have the get question method and if I cap it off with the parentheses,

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everything is fine and we can see if we hover over, it's returning as a string.

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So if I also create a variable here of type string called the question text maybe.

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I can set this string variable to the result of getting the question out of the script object.

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So hopefully that makes a bit of sense.

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Don't worry too much about this red squiggly here.

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This is just because I've named the method the same as the class.

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So if I call this test a this would go away.

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But hopefully this gets a method that we've created up here is now making a bit more sense.

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We've really just controlled the flow of access to the data within our script for object, which is

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really good for protecting it from accidental changes.

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So that's all for this one.

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Quite a short video, but hopefully this getter method is all making a little bit of sense.

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And in the next lecture we're going to finish off our script to object by adding a couple more variables

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at the top for storing our answers and also creating some other getter methods to return those answers

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to our future scripts.

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So to sign off, I'm going to get rid of this test class that we don't need, and I'll see you in the

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next lecture.