Is it good practice to define a getter which does not return a specific field?

Question

a kind of simple question. Are methods like this good practice?

private NavigableMap<Double, Site> m_sites;

private Site getRandomSite()
{
    return m_sites.ceilingEntry(Math.random()).getValue();
}

Or is it bad because it is a getter and you could expect that it would return the field "randomSite"?

Answer 1

The method is fine, although I can understand that you wouldn't want to call it getRandomSite() because it looks like a getter method. Building on Gio's answer, I suggest you call the method fetchRandomSite() because as you said, this method does not generate the random site, it simply picks (or fetches) it out of a NavigableMap.

Answer 2

If you, the author of the code, think it is confusing / bad with respect to the rest of your code base, than change the name to for example generateRandomNumber(). However, there is no convention which says that a "get method" must always return a field.