Anyone else find naming classes and methods one of the most difficult parts in programming?
What you are doing now is fine, and I highly recommend you stick with your current syntax, being:
context + verb + how
I use this method to name functions/methods, SQL stored procs, etc. By keeping with this syntax, it will keep your Intellisense/Code Panes much more neat. So you want EmployeeGetByID() EmployeeAdd(), EmployeeDeleteByID(). When you use a more grammatically correct syntax such as GetEmployee(), AddEmployee() you'll see that this gets really messy if you have multiple Gets in the same class as unrelated things will be grouped together.
I akin this to naming files with dates, you want to say 2009-01-07.log not 1-7-2009.log because after you have a bunch of them, the order becomes totally useless.
One lesson I have learned, is that if you can't find a name for a class, there is almost always something wrong with that class:
- you don't need it
- it does too much
A good naming convention should minimize the number of possible names you can use for any given variable, class, method, or function. If there is only one possible name, you'll never have trouble remembering it.
For functions and for singleton classes, I scrutinize the function to see if its basic function is to transform one kind of thing into another kind of thing. I'm using that term very loosely, but you'll discover that a HUGE number of functions that you write essentially take something in one form and produce something in another form.
In your case it sounds like your class transforms a Url into a Document. It's a little bit weird to think of it that way, but perfectly correct, and when you start looking for this pattern, you'll see it everywhere.
When I find this pattern, I always name the function xFromy.
Since your function transforms a Url into a Document, I would name it
DocumentFromUrl
This pattern is remarkably common. For example:
atoi -> IntFromString
GetWindowWidth -> WidthInPixelsFromHwnd // or DxFromWnd if you like Hungarian
CreateProcess -> ProcessFromCommandLine
You could also use UrlToDocument if you're more comfortable with that order. Whether you say xFromy or yTox is probably a matter of taste, but I prefer the From order because that way the beginning of the function name already tells you what type it returns.
Pick one convention and stick to it. If you are careful to use the same names as your class names in your xFromy functions, it'll be a lot easier to remember what names you used. Of course, this pattern doesn't work for everything, but it does work where you're writing code that can be thought of as "functional."