5.16 Mistaking Object Generalization for the Need to Build Classes at Runtime

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Another category of problem manifests itself through inheritance hierarchies. This problem occurs when a developer thinks that he or she needs to create new classes at runtime. The domain in which this problem presented itself was a case where a development team was designing a trading system for securities. One requirement of the system was to allow securities traders to build deals around a fixed set of securities set by the SEC and other government bodies. They designed the class hierarchy displayed in Figure 5.34 to model these securities.

Figure 5.34. The Security class hierarchy.

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A second requirement stated that traders want the ability to invent and trade new securities on a moment's notice. For example, a trader may decide to group a gold option with a taxfree municipal bond and call it a new security, say a Gmuni . Even worse , the trader may decide to take his or her new Gmuni security and combine it with Lotus Development Corp. stock and call this new security a GmuniLotus (see Figure 5.35). [*] The possible permutations are endless. This led the developers to assume that they needed an interpreted language to carry out their goals, since compiled languages wouldn't allow them to create classes and inheritance relationships at runtime.

[*] Readers that are in the securities industry will find these examples unrealistic for the domain. The securities examples were selected for clarity across a wide audience, and are adequate for discussing the heuristic.

Figure 5.35. The Security class hierarchy with new securities.

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When faced with these situations, a designer needs to reconsider the problem. We should state, "We do not build classes at runtime; we build objects at runtime." The problem for us to solve is the generalization of the things we consider classes, but are really objects. The resulting generalization will be a new class that captures the abstractions within our problem. In this example, let us consider the Gmuni , GmuniLotus , and a number of other custom-built securities to be objects. What class would capture the abstraction to which these objects belong? In the most general case, these objects belong to a class that is a container of securities. This can be captured in the BasketOfSecurity class shown in Figure 5.36.

Figure 5.36. Solution to generalizing custom Security objects.

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Figure 5.37 illustrates that not only does the BasketOfSecurity class contain a list of securities, but it is itself a security. This is an unusual, but not incorrect, case where a class contains and inherits from the same class. It is unusual only because containers of items are seldom a special type of the items that they contain. Another example of this construct can be seen in graphical user interface classes. A window can be viewed as a container of window items ( buttons , sliders, borders, etc.). In addition, a window is a window item because windows can contain windows .

Figure 5.37. The new Security class hierarchy.

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Consider a pure polymorphic function called price() . Each security in the hierarchy must define a price method describing the security's current value. If the price of any BasketOfSecurity is simply the sum of its components , then the method is trivial. We simply loop over the list of securities, summing the price of each. In the active world of securities, this simple scheme is inadequate. The traders of securities build new securities, which amount to hedged bets. By selling gold and buying silver in one security, the trader limits the potential for loss since gold and silver tend to rise and fall together. The trader is hoping the spread between the two increases in his or her favor. Some of these hedging structures can have complex pricing schemes. Beware of class designers who argue that since each BasketOfSecurity knows how to price itself differently, each should be a different class with a polymorphic price method. The items in question are still objects. It is just that the problem of pricing them has gotten tougher to generalize. We need to come up with a pricing formula that is encapsulated in each BasketOfSecurity object (see Figure 5.38). A generic pricing method can then use this encapsulated formula to calculate the price of the new security.

Figure 5.38. Solution to generalizing custom Security objects.

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Another case where this problem arose was in a group of developers designing a reporting system for automobile engine test data. The requirements of the system included the ability for end users to describe complex reports such as, "Show me the blah-blah-blah statistics averaged over every tenth point for the first two thousand data points then every fiftieth point for the next fifty thousand data points, etc." These report descriptions could be extremely complicated. The initial assumption was that each report description represented a class. Again the problem was creating classes at runtime. The solution was to treat every report as an object and then find a good report class that generalized all of them. The data implementation of this class was fairly complex, but the generic methods were surprisingly easy. The main benefit was that only objects were built at runtime, not classes.

Heuristic 5.16

If you think you need to create new classes at runtime, take a step back and realize that what you are trying to create are objects. Now generalize these objects into a class.

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Object-Oriented Design Heuristics
Object-Oriented Design Heuristics (paperback)
ISBN: 0321774965
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1996
Pages: 180

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