Information Spilling Across Object Boundaries
- by Winston Ewert
Many times my business objects tend to have situations where information needs to cross object boundaries too often. When doing OO, we want information to be in one object and as much as possible all code dealing with that information should be in that object. However, business rules do not follow this principle giving me trouble.
As an example suppose that we have an Order which has a number of OrderItems which refers to an InventoryItem which has a price. I invoke Order.GetTotal() which sums the result of OrderItem.GetPrice() which multiples a quantity by InventoryItem.GetPrice(). So far so good.
But then we find out that some items are sold with a two for one deal. We can handle this by having OrderItem.GetPrice() do something like InventoryItem.GetPrice( quantity ) and letting InventoryItem deal with this.
However, then we find out that the two-for-one deal only lasts for a particular time period. This time period needs to be based on the date of the order. Now we change OrderItem.GetPrice() to be InventoryItem.GetPrice( quatity, order.GetDate() )
But then we need to support different prices depending on how long the customer has been in the system: InventoryItem.GetPrice( quantity, order.GetDate(), order.GetCustomer() )
But then it turns out that the two-for-one deals apply not just to buying multiple of the same inventory item but multiple for any item in a InventoryCategory. At this point we throw up our hands and just give the InventoryItem the order item and allow it to travel over the object reference graph via accessors to get the information its needs: InventoryItem.GetPrice( this )
TL;DR I want to have coupling in objects, but business rules often force me to access information from all over the place in order to make particular decisions.
Are there good techniques for dealing with this? Do others find the same problem?
