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What is Chain of Responsibility design pattern ?

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Chain of Responsibility is a behavioral design pattern that lets you pass requests along a chain of handlers. Upon receiving a request, each handler decides either to process the request or to pass it to the next handler in the chain.

Chain of Responsibility design pattern

 Problem

Imagine that you’re working on an online ordering system. You want to restrict access to the system so only authenticated users can create orders. Also, users who have administrative permissions must have full access to all orders.

After a bit of planning, you realized that these checks must be performed sequentially. The application can attempt to authenticate a user to the system whenever it receives a request that contains the user’s credentials. However, if those credentials aren’t correct and authentication fails, there’s no reason to proceed with any other checks.

Problem, solved by Chain of Responsibility

The request must pass a series of checks before the ordering system itself can handle it.

During the next few months, you implemented several more of those sequential checks.

One of your colleagues suggested that it’s unsafe to pass raw data straight to the ordering system. So you added an extra validation step to sanitize the data in a request.

Later, somebody noticed that the system is vulnerable to brute force password cracking. To negate this, you promptly added a check that filters repeated failed requests coming from the same IP address.

Someone else suggested that you could speed up the system by returning cached results on repeated requests containing the same data. Hence, you added another check which lets the request pass through to the system only if there’s no suitable cached response.

With each new check the code became bigger, messier, and uglier

The bigger the code grew, the messier it became.

The code of the checks, which had already looked like a mess, became more and more bloated as you added each new feature. Changing one check sometimes affected the others. Worst of all, when you tried to reuse the checks to protect other components of the system, you had to duplicate some of the code since those components required some of the checks, but not all of them.

The system became very hard to comprehend and expensive to maintain. You struggled with the code for a while, until one day you decided to refactor the whole thing.

 Solution

Like many other behavioral design patterns, the Chain of Responsibility relies on transforming particular behaviors into stand-alone objects called handlers. In our case, each check should be extracted to its own class with a single method that performs the check. The request, along with its data, is passed to this method as an argument.

The pattern suggests that you link these handlers into a chain. Each linked handler has a field for storing a reference to the next handler in the chain. In addition to processing a request, handlers pass the request further along the chain. The request travels along the chain until all handlers have had a chance to process it.

Here’s the best part: a handler can decide not to pass the request further down the chain and effectively stop any further processing.

In our example with ordering systems, a handler performs the processing and then decides whether to pass the request further down the chain. Assuming the request contains the right data, all the handlers can execute their primary behavior, whether it’s authentication checks or caching.

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