GRASP Design Principles

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GRASP design Principles, GRASP stands for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns. It guides in assigning responsibilities to collaborate objects.

9 GRASP Design patterns

Following are the list of GRASP desgin Principles which I try to explain in simple way and concise way.

  1. Creator
  2. Information Expert
  3. Low Coupling
  4. Controller
  5. High Cohesion
  6. Indirection
  7. Polymorphism
  8. Protected Variations
  9. Pure Fabrication

How to Attache Responsiblity to a Object

  • Responsibility can be accomplished by a single object or a group of object collaboratively accomplish a responsibility.
  • GRASP helps us in deciding which responsibility should be assigned to which object/class.
  • Identify the objects and responsibilities from the problem domain, and also identify how objects interact with each other.
  • Define blue print for those objects e.g. class with methods implementing those responsibilities.

The following are mail design principle

1. Creator of GRASP design Patterns

  • Who creates an Object? Or who should create a new instance of some class?
  • Container” object creates “contained” objects.
  • Decide who can be creator based on the objects association and their interaction.

2. Expert

  • provided an object obj, which responsibilities can be assigned to obj?
  • Expert principle says that assign those responsibilities to obj for which obj has the information to fulfill that responsibility.
  • They have all the information needed to perform operations, or in some cases they collaborate with others to fulfill their responsibilities.

3. Low Coupling

  • How strongly the objects are connected to each other?
  • Coupling – object depending on other object.
  • When depended upon element changes, it affects the dependant also.
  • Low Coupling – How can we reduce the impact of change in depended upon elements on dependant elements.
  • Prefer low coupling – assign responsibilities so that coupling remain low.
  • Minimizes the dependency hence making system maintainable, efficient and code reusable
  • Two elements can be coupled, by following if
    • One element has aggregation/composition or association with another element.
    • – One element implements/extends other element.

4. High Cohesion

  • How are the operations of any element are functionally related?
  • Related responsibilities in to one manageable unit.
  • Prefer high cohesion
  • Clearly defines the purpose of the element
  • Benefits
    – Easily understandable and maintainable.
    – Code reuse
    – Low coupling

5. Controller in GRASP design principles

  • Deals with how to delegate the request from the UI layer objects to domain layer objects.
  • when a request comes from UI layer object, Controller pattern helps us in determining what is that first object that receive the message from the UI layer objects.
  • This object is called controller object which receives request from UI layer object and then controls/coordinates with other object of the domain layer to fulfill the request.
  • It delegates the work to other class and coordinates the overall activity.
  • We can make an object as Controller, if
    • Object represents the overall system (facade controller)
    • Object represent a use case, handling a sequence of operations

(session controller).
Benefits of Controller:
– can reuse this controller class.
– Can use to maintain the state of the use case.
– Can control the sequence of the activities

is Bloated Controllers Good Or Bad

  • Controller class is called bloated, if the class is overloaded with too many responsibilities.
  • follwoing are the solution
    • Add more controllers
    • Controller class also performing many tasks instead of delegating to other class.
    • controller class has to delegate things to others.

6. Polymorphism

  • How to handle related but varying elements based on element type?
  • Polymorphism guides us in deciding which object is responsible for handling those varying elements.
  • Benefits: handling new variations will become easy.

7. Pure Fabrication

  • Fabricated class/ artificial class – assign set of related responsibilities that doesn’t represent any domain object.
  • Provides a highly cohesive set of activities.
  • Behavioral decomposed – implements some algorithm.
  • Examples: Adapter, Strategy
  • Benefits: High cohesion, low coupling and can reuse this class.

8. Indirection

  • How can we avoid a direct coupling between two or more elements.
  • Indirection introduces an intermediate unit to communicate between the other units, so that the other units are not directly coupled.
  • Benefits: low coupling, e.g Facade, Adapter, Obserever.
  • Class Employee provides a level of indirection to other units of the system.

9. Protected Variation

This section is about P: protoected Variation from GRASP design Principles.

  • How to avoid impact of variations of some elements on the other elements.
  • It provides a well defined interface so that the there will be no affect on other units.
  • Provides flexibility and protection from variations.
  • Provides more structured design. Example: polymorphism, data encapsulation, interfaces

References

Thanks for visiting this post for GRASP design Principles i.e. SOLID and GRASP. You can also visit Design Pattens tutorial Listing page for more articles on Object Oriented design Patterns and design principles.
Happy Learning 🙂 for GRASP design patterns.


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