What is Filter pattern?

Question

Q.What is Filter pattern?

Answer 1

Filter pattern or Criteria pattern is a design pattern that enables developers to filter a set of objects using different criteria and chaining them in a decoupled way through logical operations. This type of design pattern comes under structural pattern as this pattern combines multiple criteria to obtain single criteria.

Filter design pattern is useful where you want to add filters dynamically or you are implementing multiple functionalities and most of them require different filter criteria to filter something. In that case instead of hard coding the filters inside the functionalities, you can create filter criteria and re-use it wherever required.

List<Laptop> laptops = LaptopFactory.manufactureInBulk();
AndCriteria searchCriteria = new AndCriteria(
  new HardDisk250GBFilter(), 
  new MacintoshFilter(), 
  new I5ProcessorFilter());
List<Laptop> filteredLaptops = searchCriteria.meets(laptops);