I was happily building business objects, and suddenly I noticed I was doing method calls to the objects two different ways. All the objects work off parameterized views of the data; some methods operated on "pre-existing data", while others passed the parameter and fetched a new data set.

Because this is a recipe for programmer frustration, some of the methods are going to change, but which ones..? Which methodology is better, and why?

Or would it be better to recode them all so that no parameter worked on the current data, and a passed parameter requeried before acting?

Chris.