Right now this is ok because you're only calling this once on startup, but it's kind of like an untriggered mine for other people who may use this code -- there's no indication that it'll be an expensive operation (as most getters are cheap). You could get around this by having createVisibleEventsList_ cache the count as a member, and call it once at step creation (unless you already know it when you create a step). That way it'll be nice and fast. Other solutions would include caching it on first call, however that gets trickier to follow.