Is it possible to access public server controller variables from lightning client controller

Question

All the docs I've read mention how to access data thru public static methods annotated with @AuraEnabled but is it possible to access public variables defined in the server controller like we can in visualforce pages?

Answer 1

Actually, neither Visualforce nor Lightning components allows access from the page/component context to variables in an Apex controller.

Lightning Components allows access purely through methods exposed as at least public, and annotated as @AuraEnabled. Remember that LCF has no feature that is directly executed on the server side. So if you want to surface it, you need to write a method.

Visualforce gives several options:

• Getter/setter methods
• Properties
• RemoteAction annotated methods

But technically speaking, none of these are variables in the strictest sense.

I suspect the confusion comes from the fact that properties might look like variables syntactically, but the way I think of properties is as a special syntactic convention for creating getter and setter methods (although there may be more to it than that).

In making this distinction, I primarily rely on the difference that variables store some kind of value, and methods contain one or more instructions to execute logic.