1.5.7 How to Return a Value from a Method

Returning values is necessary in programming because oftentimes a method will do math or perform an action that changes a value and because methods only "live" as long as they are doing something, that value dies off if nothing is done with it.

Let's give the TicketBooth Attendant the ability to calculate their daily wage.

We can call it from the MainWindow...

...and step through it to see that the fatStacks variable is assigned 93.75...

...but when we step back to the MainWindow, the money is nowhere to be found.

That isn't good news for the Employee. They won't ever be able to get their fat stacks if there is no record of their wages. So what we can do is set up a return to make sure that value is usable in the MainWindow.

The first thing that needs to happen is we need to change the type of return from returning nothing (void) to retuning a decimal value.

When this happens an error will occur because nothing is actually being returned yet. We need to add a return statement that returns the fatStacks variable's value.

When we run the application and step over the call, there still isn't access to the wage calculated from the method. This is because the return hasn't been assigned to anything.

To do this, define a variable of type decimal and assign it to the call to CalculateWage.

Now when we run the application and step over the method, the dailyWage variable now has the value that was returned from the CalculateWage method.

Now that the value from CalculateWage has been stored in the dailyWage variable we can use that variable for other things like passing it into a method that needs that value to pay the Employee.