I often have the same trouble when I have to design my class for a web application. The requirements are :
- maintainable (no copy-paste for instance)
- layers fully separated (the business layer doesn't have to know which method of the data layer is used)
- high performance : don't load useless data.
First I have a table with all my customers and their addresses :
Code :
Customer
--Id
--Name
--Address
----City
----ZC
----Street
Now I want a table (in another page) with all my customers and the books that they bought, I have a few possibilities :
1/ I create a new class :
Code :
CustomerWithBooks
--Id
--Name
--Books[]
----ID
----name
PRO : I load only the useful data
CONS : I build my class after my UI , and there is copy-paste.
2/ I add Books[] to the first class.
PRO : Everything is in the same class, it's maintainable
CONS : I load the address for nothing. If I don't load the address I can : lazy loading, but I really don't like it, or when I use my class I have to know which method of my DAL i called, and I don't like it.
3/ I use inheritance :
Code :
ClientBase
--ID
--Name
ClientWithBooks : ClientBase
--Books[]
ClientWithAdress : ClientBase
--Address
PRO: really maintenable, and I don't load data for nothing
CONS : What do I do if in one UI I want to show the Books AND the Address ?
4/ ?? I hope there is a perfect solution
You option 1 is close to good, assuming I understand it correctly. A customer and a book are two completely different things. You want that data/functionality separate, and should not inherit from any common base class (that you have made).
As the "Con" you say: I build my class after my UI , and there is copy-paste.
A. If you mock up some UI to help clarify requirements before you settle on your design and code up classes, that's good, not bad.
B. Good arrangement of your domain objects helps eliminate copy/paste, not cause it. If you have some seemingly repetitive code within your well-arranged classes (often data access code) that's typical, don't worry. You can address with with a good data-access layer/tool, good shared logging resources, etc. Repetitive code within your classes just means you have more design improvement to do, not that having separate classes for all your domain realities is bad.
On the page where you need to deal with both customers and books, you will use customer objects and book objects, and probably a books collection object. And depending on how your db/object-model are set up, you might be dealing with other objects to get form customer to the books they bought. For example, the customers probably buy 1 or more books at the same time, and these are tied to an Order object, which has a reference to a customer. So, you'll probably go from a
Customer to an
Orders collection containing all of that customers orders to the individual
Order objects and from there to a corresponding
Books collection containing all the
Book objects that relate to that Order object.
None of these need to inherit from each other. Now, let's say getting all the books bought by a customer is something you do a lot, and you want to streamline that. You then want to have a Books collection directly off of Customer that gives you that, though the sql queries you use to get those books still goes through Orders in the db. You must start with your object model (and tables behind the scenes) reflecting reality accurately. Even if this give you seemingly many classes, it is more simple in the end. You might end up with some inheritance, you might not.
I would to avoid 2 and 3, because it locks you into a restrictive hierarchy that doesn't really meet your needs. As you point out, there could be any combination of things that you want, such as customers and their books, and maybe their address, and maybe their ordering history. Or maybe you'll want a book with it's list of customers. Since your underlying business information is not really hierarchical, you should try to avoid making your object model unnecessarily hierarchical. Otherwise, you will build in restrictions that will cause you a lot of headaches later, because you can't think of all the scenerios now.
I think you're on the right track with 1. I would say to create some basic classes for Customers and Books, and then create a CustomerBook association class that contains an instance both the customer and the book. Then you can have you methods worry about how to load the data into that list for a given scenerio.
I would stick the address into Customer, and have a separate collection of books.
Bookshelf
--Books[]
This way, a Customer doesn't have, but can have, one or more books associated to him. PHP-code example following:
class BookshelfFactory {
public static function getBookshelf(Customer $customer) {
// perform some fetching here
return $bookshelf;
}
}
You're sort of designing backwards from an OOA&D standpoint. It's normal to use data-driven design at the persistence (usually a relational database) layer. But in OOA&D it's more normal to think of the messages an object will send and receive (you model an object's methods not its members). I would think about it this way:
Customer
+getBooks():List<Book>
+getAddress():Address
I think your problem is an issue for the implementation of your data mapping layer.
You can have highly performant queries with JOINS that return you the Customers as well as their Books.
Your mapping layer maps this into the appropriate unique objects and is responsible for creating the right 1-many aggregation for your objects.
In addition you could cater for shallow loading, for display properties to save unnecessary amounts of data to be transferred where you only need a few attributes per object.
Related
I recurrently run into an scenario similar to this:
A container business class that models a hierarchy.
A business class that participates in this hierarchy and is aggregated by the aforementioned class.
Let me give you an example.
A Map has Countries. Now the Map should know where each Country is, since its main responsability besides containing all countries is to know the locations and proximity of each. From this point of view, a functionality such as isNeighbour(Country A, Country B) seems like a correct addition to Map. However, each Country should also offer a method to know if a country is nearby. Say spain.isNeighbour(italy). This is indeed useful. Now, if I don't want to duplicate functionality and responsability, what approach should I take?
The current example I am working on is something for my university, each course requires other courses and also blocks the next level ones. The major is the one that contains all courses and dictates which course precedes which. Say I want to add a dependency of a course over another, e.g to take Calculus 2 you need Calculus 1... Should I go calculus.addRequired(calculus2) and then pass it to the major object, or maybe computerScience.addRequired(calculus1, calculus2)...
I don't want to have both alternatives because to me it seems it can lead to error, but at the same time I want each course to be able to answer what are its requirements. I don't really know how to distribute responsabilities correctly.
First thing is, that there is no problem calling each other.
You can have
boolean Map.isNeighbour(Country A, Country B) { return A.isNeighbour(B); }
or
boolean Country.isNeighbour(Country other) { return map.isNeighbour(this, other); }
Second seems to need reference to global map. First makes Map look like simple facade.
Second thing is that you say it is persisted. There also might be good idea to create a service, that will query DB with related parameters. This can be either Map or some repository service. This will also allow you to query with only identities of entities (eg. countryId) instead of full objects.
I believe neither of the solutions is better or worse. Only point of difference is where other developers expect the methods to be located. But when I think about it, this would mean Map will have all responsibilities of Country, thus breaking SRP, especially if it is not call-through to the country method.
I would put the isNeighbour() method into Country.
Country would contain a map of neighbours. And then the container can call this method on the country instance in question.
This way the logic is maintained by the countries, and the container simply delegates to answer the question to them.
In case of courses it is possible that Course-1 is required for Course-2 in Major-1, but not in Major-2. In this case I would introduce another class, e.g. CourseInMajor that would contain the required courses for a given course in a given Major.
I'm writing an application to help diabetics manage their condition. Information that is tracked includes blood sugar results, nutrition, exercise, and medication information.
In similar applications these entries are all presented in a single table view even though each type of entry has different fields. This data is manually tracked by many diabetics in a logbook, and I'm looking to keep that paradigm.
Each entry has some common information (timestamp, category, and notes) as well as information specific to each entry type. For instance, meal entries would have detailed nutrition information (carb counts, fiber, fat, etc), medication entries would indicate which medication and dosage, etc.
I've considered two different approaches but I'm getting stuck at both a conceptual level and a technical level when attempting to implement either. The first approach was to create an abstract entity to contain all the common fields and then create entities for each log entry type (meals, meds, bg, etc.) that are parented to the abstract entity. I had this all modeled out but couldn't quite figure out how to bind these items to an array controller to have them show up in a single table view.
The second approach is to have one entity that contains the common fields, and then model the specific entry types as separate entities that have a relationship back to the common record (sort of like a decorator pattern). This was somewhat easier to build the UI for (at least for the common field entity), but I come to the same problem when wanting to bind the specific data entities.
Of course the easiest approach is to just throw all the fields from each different entry type into one entity but that goes against all my sensibilities. And it seems I would still run into a similar problem when I go to bind things to the table view.
My end goal is to provide an interface to the user that shows each entry in chronological order in a unified interface instead of having to keep a separate list of each entry type. I'm fine with adding code where needed, but I'd like to use the bindings as much as possible.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Don't get bogged down with entity inheritance. You shouldn't use it save duplicate attributes like you would with classes. It's major use is allow different entities to be in the same relationship. Also, entity inheritance and class inheritance don't have to overlap. You can have a class inheritance hierarchy without an entity inheritance hierarchy.
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you really need but here's some generic advice: You shouldn't create your data model based on the needs of the UI. The data model is really a simulation of the real-world objects, events or conditions that your app deals with. You should create your data model first and foremost to accurately simulate the data. Ideally, you should create a data model that could be used with any UI e.g. command-line, GUI, web page etc.
Once your model is accurately setup, then whipping up the UI is usually easy.
I am using WCF with Entity Framework v4 and using POCO entities. Our entities have a large number of related entities. One object can have many children objects of a different type which then in turn of many children of different types. For example a Car has 1 or many drivers. Each driver has 0 or many children. Each child then has 0 or many friends. (Poor child with 0 friends). The example is a bit daft but you get the point.
If the client wanted to ask for a car it would make sense to return the car with a list of its drivers. It might or might not make sense to populate and return each driver's children. And the problem goes on and on.
Because your database almost always consists of only interconnected tables (leading to interconnected entities) how much of the object graph should we serialize?
Is there a best practice when it comes to SOA?
Should it only be the immediately related entities?
Is there some sort of naming convention?
Should we use different methods for example GetCar() and GetCarWithDrivers()?
I don't think there is any rule of thumb and I don't like the idea of returning data which client does not need. You service design should be driven by business functionality provided to clients. So if you expect that client will often need only Car you should define operation which will return only Car. If the client can sometimes also need Car with Drivers you should define second operation which will return Car with Drivers.
If your service works mostly as high level CRUD then it can be resonable to return at least first level of related objects but again that is only generalization based on provided functionality. Another helpful technique can be aggregates. In aggregates related entity doesn't make sense without parent entity. For example Car with Driver is not aggregate because Driver is separate entity. But Invoice and InvoiceLine is aggregate because you cannot define InvoiceLine without Invoice. In this case it can be useful to return Invoice with all InvoiceLines. Again this is not true in all situations. I worked on approval application where users were allowed to see and approve only Invoice header and InvoiceLines from their cost centre so if Invoice containted 50+ InvoiceLines but user was allowed to see only single line there was no reason to transfer them all.
Think about functionality provided by your service and needed complexity of transfered objects will be much clearer.
I did some Googling and found the following article which suggests only go to entities immediately related to the one that the client asked for. For everyone else: Service Orientated vs Object Orientated
I thought it was about time to have a look at OO databases and decided to use db4o for my next little project - a small library.
Consider the following objects: Book, Category.
A Book can be in 0-n categories and a Category can be applied to 0-m Books.
My first thought is to have a joining object such as BookCatecory but after a bit of Googling I see that this is not appropriate for 'Real OO'.
So another approach (recommended by many) is to have a list in both objects: Book.categories and Category.books. One side handles the relationship: Book.addCategory adds Category to Book.categories and Book to Category.books. How to handle commits and rollbacks when 2 objects are been altered within one method call?
What are your thoughts? The second approach has obvious advantages but, for me at least, the first 'feels' right (better normed).
There are really only two ways I can think of to solve this problem, both of which you've mentioned. Personally, I would go with the first approach (creating a mapping object as an OO entity). This prevents you from keeping redundant information around and having to synchronize; it also means that if the association ends up having fields of its own (the date that the book was assigned to that category, let's say), they can be incorporated easily. We use this approach for a variety of associations in our system.
The OO entities would look like:
BookCategory {
Book book
Category category
}
Book {
Collection <BookCategory> categories
}
Category {
Collection <BookCategory> categories
}
Here you have to keep the relation object and the two collections in synch; however, the collections are optional in this case. Typically you could get the same information with an ORM query, something like:
select b.book from BookCategory b where b.category = MyCategory
The alternative is to have a setup like:
Book {
Collection<Category> categories
}
Category {
Collection<Books> books
}
If your ORM/DB tool automatically maintains the associations, this is fine; otherwise, you are stuck updating both collections. (In Hibernate, one side will have the property: inverse=true on the mapping; this side is not updated, so strictly speaking it doesn't need to be maintained. This seems to me like bad practice, though.)
If you typically only access the relation one way (for example, getting all of the books in a category), you could eliminate the collection on other side; then I think you would have to work around the ORM tool and use a native query in order to access the relationship from the other direction.
We use Hibernate (a java-based Object Relational Mapping tool) on our project; the Hibernate docs are a good reference for OO/relational design problems, though you may have to spend a little time learning Hibernate to make them useful:
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html_single/#collections-ofvalues
HTH!
If you use object database you don't need to care how relations are stored in database. You define classes and relationships between them. Please read the reference guided to your database. Examples of relationships:
n:n attribute, referencing from the parent
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
List addresses;
}
class Address {
}
n:n attribute, referencing from the child
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
}
class Address {
List persons
}
n:n attribute, bidirectional references
------------------------------------------------------------------
class Person {
List addresses;
}
class Address {
List persons
}
I think you're just a little hung up on the relational db way of thinking. Lists in each object is the right OO thing to do. Commits and rollbacks are no problem, they happen in a transaction that commits everything or rolls back everything.
In a pure OO database such as GemStone the objects themselves have collections of references to other objects. When the object is referenced from the application the OODBMS generates a proxy that wraps the object. The schema for this is just the persisted object and its collection of references to the objects it refers to. The OODBMS does not necessarily need a link entity.
With an O/R mapping layer (assuming it is clever enough to do M:M relationships) the M:M relationship is manifested as a collection of subsidiary references on the object itself which the O/R mapper resolves to the link entity behind the scenes. Not all O/R mappers do this, so you may have a separate link object.
Do you have any particular reason you wanted to use an ODBMS? For simple data structures (such as categorizing books) you generally won't find any advantage in ODBMS over RDBMS, and in fact will have an easier time working in the much-more-standardized world of RDBMS. ODBMS has very tangible advantages when you are working with complex data types or literal persistence/storage of dynamic objects. ODBMS also is cited as being much faster and more scalable than RDBMS, though I can offer little insight into this myself. Here are a couple pages that discuss RDBMS vs. ODBMS, however:
Whatever Happened to Object-Oriented Databases
Object-Oriented Database vs. Object-Rleational Database (SO)
I would avoid data duplication because then you run into all kinds of problems with merging the differences.
the trick to this is references.
the result is that I would have each object contain a collection of references to the other object type as well as having an independent collection of the other objects.
The matching table is a relational concept, unless that intermediary connecting class may have properties that are not attributable to either of the objects. It is there as it enables queries to be written in a powerful manner as it reduces the relation to 2 one to many relations and greatly reduces data duplication. If you did this in a relation database without the matching table then things would get evil very quickly - how would an update operate? Personally i find the attraction of oo databases to be stepping away from this
the way that i would tie all the objects together is via events in code to some kind of transaction handler to allow the caching of objects states. so rather than objects manipulating each others properties they request a change through the handler and await the result in a callback.
I encountered this a couple of times now, and i wondered what is the OO way to solve circular references. By that i mean class A has class B as a member, and B in turn has class A as a member.
One example of this would be class Person that has Person spouse as a member.
Person jack = new Person("Jack");
Person jill = new Person("Jill");
jack.setSpouse(jill);
jill.setSpouse(jack);
Another example would be Product classes that have some Collection of other Products as a member. That collection could for example be products that people who are interested in this product might also be interested in, and we want to upkeep that list on a per-product base, not on same shared attributes (e.g. we don't want to just display all other products in the same category).
Product pc = new Product("pc");
Product monitor = new Product("monitor");
Product tv = new Product("tv");
pc.setSeeAlso({monitor, tv});
monitor.setSeeAlso({pc});
tv.setSeeAlso(null);
(these products are just for making a point, the issue is not about wether or not certain products would relate to each other)
Would this be bad design in OOP in general? Would/should all OOP languages allow this, or is it just bad practice? If it's bad practice, what would be the nicest way of solving this?
The examples you give are (to me, anyway) examples of reasonable OO design.
The cross-referencing issue you describe isn't an artifact of any design process but a real-life characteristic of the things you're representing as objects, so I don't see there's a problem.
What have you encountered that has given you the impression that this approach is bad-design?
Update 11 March:
In systems that lack garbage collection, where memory management is explicitly managed, one common approach is to require all objects to have an owner - some other object responsible for managing the lifetime of that object.
One example is Delphi's TComponent class, which provides cascading support - destroy the parent component, and all owned components are also destroyed.
If you're working on such a system, the kinds of referential loop described in this question may be considered poor design because there's no clear owner, no one object responsible for managing lifetimes.
The way that I've seen this handled in some systems is to retain the references (because they properly capture the business concerns), and to add in an explicit TransactionContext object that owns everything loaded into the business domain from the database. This context object takes care of knowing which objects need to be saved, and cleans everything up when processing is complete.
It's not a fundamental problem in OO design. An example of a time it might become a problem is in graph traversal, for instance, finding the shortest path between two objects - you could potentially get into an infinite loop. However, that's something you would have to consider on a case-by-case basis. If you know there could be cross-references in a case like that, then code some checks in to avoid infinite loops (for instance, maintaining a set of visited nodes to avoid re-visiting). But if there's no reason it could be a problem (such as in the examples you gave in your question), then it's not bad at all to have such cross-references. And in many cases, as you've described, it's a good solution to the problem at hand.
I do not think this is an example of cross referencing.
Cross referencing usually pertains to this case:
class A
{
public void MethodA(B objectB)
{
objectB.SomeMethodInB();
}
}
class B
{
public void MethodB(A objectA)
{
objectA.SomeMethodInA();
}
}
In this case each object kind of "reaches in" to each other; A calls B, B calls A, and they become tightly coupled. This is made even worse if A and B are in different packages/namespaces/assemblies; in many cases those would create compile time errors as assemblies are compiled linearly.
The way to solve that is to have either object implement an interface with the desired method.
In your case you only have one level of "reaching in":
public Class Person
{
public void setSpouse(Person person)
{ ... }
}
I do not think this is unreasonable, nor even a case of cross-referencing/circular references.
The main time this is a problem is if it becomes too confusing to cope with, or maintain, as it can become a form of spaghetti code.
However, to touch on your examples;
See Also is perfectly valid if this is a feature you need in your code - it is a simple list of pointers (or references) to other items a user may be interested in.
Similarily it is perfectly valid to add spouse, as this is a simple real world relationship that would not be confusing to someone maintaining your code.
I have always seen it as a potential code smell, or perhaps a warning to take a step back and rationalise what I am doing.
As for some systems finding recursive relationships in your code (mentioned in a comment above), these can come up regardless of this sort of design. I have recently worked on a metadata capture system that had recursive 'types' of relationships - i.e Columns being logically related to other columns. It needs to be handled by the code trying to parse your system.
I don't think the circular references as such are a problem.
However, putting all those relationships inside objects may add too much clutter, so you may instead want to represent them externally. E.g. you might use a hash table to store relationships between products.
Referencing other objects is not a real bad OO design at all. It's the way state is managed within each object.
A good rule of thumb is the Law of Demeter. Look at this perfect paper of LoD (Paperboy and the wallet): click here
One way to fix this is to refer to other object via an id.
e.g.
Person jack = new Person(new PersonId("Jack"));
Person jill = new Person(new PersonId("Jill"));
jack.setSpouse(jill.getId());
jill.setSpouse(jack.getId());
I'm not saying it is a perfect solution, but it will prevent circular references. You are using an object instead of a object reference to model the relationship.