Organizing Data
These refactoring techniques help with data handling, replacing primitives with rich class functionality.
Another important result is untangling of class associations, which makes classes more portable and reusable.
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Problem: You use direct access to private fields inside a class.
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Solution: Create a getter and setter for the field, and use only them for accessing the field.
Replace Data Value with Object
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Problem: A class (or group of classes) contains a data field. The field has its own behavior and associated data.
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Solution: Create a new class, place the old field and its behavior in the class, and store the object of the class in the original class.
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Problem: So you have many identical instances of a single class that you need to replace with a single object.
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Solution: Convert the identical objects to a single reference object.
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Problem: You have a reference object that’s too small and infrequently changed to justify managing its life cycle.
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Solution: Turn it into a value object.
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Problem: You have an array that contains various types of data.
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Solution: Replace the array with an object that will have separate fields for each element.
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Problem: Is domain data stored in classes responsible for the GUI?
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Solution: Then it’s a good idea to separate the data into separate classes, ensuring connection and synchronization between the domain class and the GUI.
Change Unidirectional Association to Bidirectional
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Problem: You have two classes that each need to use the features of the other, but the association between them is only unidirectional.
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Solution: Add the missing association to the class that needs it.
Change Bidirectional Association to Unidirectional
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Problem: You have a bidirectional association between classes, but one of the classes doesn’t use the other’s features.
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Solution: Remove the unused association.
Replace Magic Number with Symbolic Constant
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Problem: Your code uses a number that has a certain meaning to it.
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Solution: Replace this number with a constant that has a human-readable name explaining the meaning of the number.
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Problem: You have a public field.
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Solution: Make the field private and create access methods for it.
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Problem: A class contains a collection field and a simple getter and setter for working with the collection.
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Solution: Make the getter-returned value read-only and create methods for adding/deleting elements of the collection.
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Problem: A class has a field that contains type code. The values of this type aren’t used in operator conditions and don’t affect the behavior of the program.
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Solution: Create a new class and use its objects instead of the type code values.
Replace Type Code with Subclasses
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Problem: You have a coded type that directly affects program behavior (values of this field trigger various code in conditionals).
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Solution: Create subclasses for each value of the coded type. Then extract the relevant behaviors from the original class to these subclasses. Replace the control flow code with polymorphism.
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Problem: You have a coded type that affects behavior but you can’t use subclasses to get rid of it.
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Solution: Replace type code with a state object. If it’s necessary to replace a field value with type code, another state object is “plugged in”.
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Problem: You have subclasses differing only in their (constant-returning) methods.
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Solution: Replace the methods with fields in the parent class and delete the subclasses.