What is the use of Association, Aggregation and Composition (Encapsulation) in Classes
- by SahilMahajanMj
I have gone through lots of theories about what is encapsulation and the three techniques of implementing it, which are Association, Aggregation and Composition.
What i found is,
Encapsulation
Encapsulation is the technique of making the fields in a class private and providing access to the fields via public methods. If a field is declared private, it cannot be accessed by anyone outside the class, thereby hiding the fields within the class. For this reason, encapsulation is also referred to as data hiding.
Encapsulation can be described as a protective barrier that prevents the code and data being randomly accessed by other code defined outside the class. Access to the data and code is tightly controlled by an interface.
The main benefit of encapsulation is the ability to modify our implemented code without breaking the code of others who use our code. With this feature Encapsulation gives maintainability, flexibility and extensibility to our code.
Association
Association is a relationship where all object have their own lifecycle and there is no owner. Let’s take an example of Teacher and Student. Multiple students can associate with single teacher and single student can associate with multiple teachers but there is no ownership between the objects and both have their own lifecycle. Both can create and delete independently.
Aggregation
Aggregation is a specialize form of Association where all object have their own lifecycle but there is ownership and child object can not belongs to another parent object. Let’s take an example of Department and teacher. A single teacher can not belongs to multiple departments, but if we delete the department teacher object will not destroy. We can think about “has-a” relationship.
Composition
Composition is again specialize form of Aggregation and we can call this as a “death” relationship. It is a strong type of Aggregation. Child object dose not have their lifecycle and if parent object deletes all child object will also be deleted. Let’s take again an example of relationship between House and rooms. House can contain multiple rooms there is no independent life of room and any room can not belongs to two different house if we delete the house room will automatically delete.
The question is:
Now these all are real world examples. I am looking for some description about how to use these techniques in actual class code. I mean what is the point for using three different techniques for encapsulation, How these techniques could be implemented and How to choose which technique is applicable at time.
