suggestions wanted: what to name a class that represents a real-life "event"

Question

I need to define a class that represents a real-life event -- like a "movie premier", "party", etc. I will be creating a set of DB objects to store the data for each event and define relationships with other data we have (e.g. venue, people, etc.).

The word "event" has different meaning in the context of software, so I'd like to name the class something other than "event".

Any ideas on another name?

This related post asks a similar question, but I think all of the suggestions lack creativity -- basically @event, the case-sensitive name Event or use the the old-school naming convention CEvent. Technically good solutions, but they don't help when discussing the data objects w/ peers (my speech & listening abilities are case-insensitive) and don't convey any information on how the class is not an event in the traditional use of the term.

Answer 1

One option would be CalendarEvent, to make it obvious that this is a real-world event tied to a given date.

Answer 2

Normally I'd recommend function, but it too has specific meanings in the context of software. ;)

Occasion might be a good synonym.

Answer 3

Perhaps "Affair" or "Advent" -- you could also check the thesaurus:

http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/event

Answer 4

The thesaurus lists the following as synonyms of the word event:

accident, act, action, advent, adventure, affair, appearance, business, calamity, case, catastrophe, celebration, ceremony, chance, circumstance, coincidence, conjuncture, crisis, deed, development, emergency, episode, experience, exploit, fact, function, holiday, incident, juncture, marvel, matter, milestone, miracle, misfortune, mishap, mistake, occasion, occurrence, pass, phase, phenomenon, predicament, proceeding, shift, situation, story, thing*, tide, transaction, triumph, turn, wonder

Surely one of them would suffice... if not, you can prepend or wrap the word event to make it a non-keyword. Something like @event or [event] although, I have to say that I don't personally like this practice even though it is syntactically permissable.

Answer 5

Entry or EventEntry are probably what I would go with.

Answer 6

I can appreciate you want to avoid confusion with events in the programming sense, but my take on it is that maybe you should go with the most obvious name; program to your domain, and things stay readable and easier to design and maintain.

Answer 7

Activity come to mind.

Answer 8

How about Happening or Occasion?

Answer 9

You could call it a 'Rendezvous'. You could also just make up a word. If this is a key concept in your domain you could abbreviate one of the other suggested names. Things like:

• CalenderEvent becomes Calvent
• SocialEvent becomes Socent
• RealWorldEvent becomes Revent
• HumanActivity becomes HAct

Those quick examples might be terrible examples but they are short, don't collide with language or library names, and will become real meaningful words for you and your coworkers very quickly if you work with them frequently.