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Mediator Pattern

The mediator pattern allows objects to interact indirectly by having them communicate through a mediator object rather than interacting directly. This reduces complexity by centralizing interaction logic in the mediator. The mediator can perform logic based on events from objects and request behavior from objects. For example, a mediator could open a door if an alarm goes off three times to allow a dog to wake its owner. The mediator pattern is commonly used for dialog boxes where user selections impact other components. While it promotes loose coupling and reuse, the mediator class could become large and difficult to maintain if overused.

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73 views5 pages

Mediator Pattern

The mediator pattern allows objects to interact indirectly by having them communicate through a mediator object rather than interacting directly. This reduces complexity by centralizing interaction logic in the mediator. The mediator can perform logic based on events from objects and request behavior from objects. For example, a mediator could open a door if an alarm goes off three times to allow a dog to wake its owner. The mediator pattern is commonly used for dialog boxes where user selections impact other components. While it promotes loose coupling and reuse, the mediator class could become large and difficult to maintain if overused.

Uploaded by

Hex Rah
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Mediator Pattern

Imagine that you want the house of the future. You want your house to change its own temperature
once you have left, to brew your coffee when the alarm on your phone goes off, and to load the
latest Globe and Mail news issue onto your tablet if you're home and it's Saturday morning.

This plan starts out nicely; you are an accomplished software developer, so making these different
objects talk is no big deal to you.

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You love your futuristic house, and you keep adding more rules and more devices. Eventually you
realize that this tangle of pairwise interactions - interactions between two objects - is becoming
complicated and difficult to maintain:

Looks like you need a Mediator Pattern.

In the Mediator pattern, you will add an object that will talk to all of these other objects and
coordinate their activities. Now, instead of objects being engaged in various pairwise interactions,
they all interact through the mediator.

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The communication between an object and the mediator is two-way: the object informs the mediator
when something happens. For example, your Phone object could inform the mediator when your
alarm goes off.

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The mediator can perform logic on these events. For example, the mediator could track the number
of times the alarm has gone off.

Finally, the mediator can request information or behaviour from an object. If the alarm has gone off
three times, then the mediator could ask your door to open, which would allow your dog to go in and
jump on you to help wake you up.

IMPLEMENTATION

The objects associated with your mediator are called colleagues. You define an interface for the
interactions between the mediator and colleagues, then instantiate a concrete mediator and concrete
colleagues as necessary.

The communication could be implemented as an Observer pattern. Each Colleague is a subclass of


the Observable class, and the Mediator is an Observer to each of them. In this case, the colleague

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should pass itself as a parameter to the mediator, so that the mediator knows to check that
colleague instead of checking all of them. The communication could also occur through an event
infrastructure.

USAGE IN SOFTWARE

A common usage for the mediator pattern, identified by the Gang of Four, is for dialog boxes with
many components. As the user makes selections, such as checking a box or choosing a certain
bullet out of a list, other parts of the dialog may have to be grayed out or changed in some other
way. Instead of components talking to each other directly, a mediator can easily manage the
different interactions like this.

CONCLUSION

The Mediator allows for loose coupling between colleagues. Since each of these colleagues only
communicates with the mediator, they can be reused more easily. Centralizing the logic of
interaction between all of these related objects in one central object makes for code that is easier to
read, maintain, and extend.

On the other hand, the mediator can quickly become very large. Large classes are generally
discouraged because they make code more difficult to debug. The benefits of centralization should
be balanced against the downsides of a large, difficult-to-read mediator class.

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