Where should instantiated classes be stored?
- by Eric C.
I'm having a bit of a design dilemma here. I'm writing a library that consists of a bunch of template classes that are designed to be used as a base for creating content. For example:
public class Template
{
public string Name {get; set;}
public string Description {get; set;}
public string Attribute1 {get; set;}
public string Attribute2 {get; set;}
public Template()
{
//constructor
}
public void DoSomething()
{
//does something
}
...
}
The problem is, not only is the library providing the templates, it will also supply quite a few predefined templates which are instances of these template classes. The question is, where do I put these instances of the templates?
The three solutions I've come up with so far are:
1) Provide serialized instances of the templates as files.
On the one hand, this solution would keep the instances separated from the library itself, which is nice, but it would also potentially add complexity for the user. Even if we provided methods for loading/deserializing the files, they'd still have to deal with a bunch of files, and some kind of config file so the app knows where to look for those files. Plus, creating the template files would probably require a separate app, so if the user wanted to stick with the files method of storing templates, we'd have to provide some kind of app for creating the template files.
Also, this requires external dependencies for testing the templates in the user's code.
2) Add readonly instances to the template class
Example:
public class Template
{
public string Name {get; set;}
public string Description {get; set;}
public string Attribute1 {get; set;}
public string Attribute2 {get; set;}
public Template PredefinedTemplate
{
get
{
Template templateInstance = new Template();
templateInstance.Name = "Some Name";
templateInstance.Description = "A description";
...
return templateInstance;
}
}
public Template()
{
//constructor
}
public void DoSomething()
{
//does something
}
...
}
This method would be convenient for users, as they would be able to access the predefined templates in code directly, and would be able to unit test code that used them. The drawback here is that the predefined templates pollute the Template type namespace with a bunch of extra stuff. I suppose I could put the predefined templates in a different namespace to get around this drawback. The only other problem with this approach is that I'd have to basically duplicate all the namespaces in the library in the predefined namespace (e.g. Templates.SubTemplates and Predefined.Templates.SubTemplates) which would be a pain, and would also make refactoring more difficult.
3) Make the templates abstract classes and make the predefined templates inherit from those classes.
For example:
public abstract class Template
{
public string Name {get; set;}
public string Description {get; set;}
public string Attribute1 {get; set;}
public string Attribute2 {get; set;}
public Template()
{
//constructor
}
public void DoSomething()
{
//does something
}
...
}
and
public class PredefinedTemplate : Template
{
public PredefinedTemplate()
{
this.Name = "Some Name";
this.Description = "A description";
this.Attribute1 = "Some Value";
...
}
}
This solution is pretty similar to #2, but it ends up creating a lot of classes that don't really do anything (none of our predefined templates are currently overriding behavior), and don't have any methods, so I'm not sure how good a practice this is.
Has anyone else had any experience with something like this? Is there a best practice of some kind, or a different/better approach that I haven't thought of? I'm kind of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the best way to go.
Thanks!
