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Decorator

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zoyajagirdar
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8 views2 pages

Decorator

Uploaded by

zoyajagirdar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Decorator

Motivation:

* Sometimes we want to add responsibilities to individual objects, not to an entire class.

A graphical user interface toolkit, for example, should let you add properties like borders or

behaviors like scrolling to any user interface component.

One way to add responsibilities is with inheritance. Inheriting a border from another class

puts a border around every subclass instance.

This is inflexible, however, because the choice of border is made statically.

A client can't control how and when to decorate the component with a border.

A more flexible approach is to enclose the component in another object that adds the border.

The enclosing object is called a decorator.

The decorator conforms to the interface of the component it decorates so that its presence is

transparent to the component's clients.

The decorator forwards requests to the component and may perform additional actions (such

as drawing a border) before or after forwarding. Transparency lets you nest decorators

recursively, thereby allowing an unlimited number of added responsibilities

For example, suppose we have a TextView object that displays text in a window.

TextView has no scroll bars by default, because we might not always need them. When we

do, we can use a ScrollDecorator to add them.

Applicability:

Use Decorator

• to add responsibilities to individual objects dynamically and transparently, that is,without affecting other
objects.

• for responsibilities that can be withdrawn.

• when extension by subclassing is impractical. Sometimes a large number of independent extensions are
possible and would produce an explosion of subclasses to support every combination.

Structure:
Participants
• Component (VisualComponent)
- defines the interface for objects that can have responsibilities added to them dynamically.
• ConcreteComponent (TextView)
- defines an object towhich additional responsibilities canbe attached.
• Decorator
- maintains a reference to a Component object and defines an interface that conforms to
Component's interface.
• ConcreteDecorator (BorderDecorator, ScrollDecorator)
- adds responsibilities to the component.

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