Classes in the Model interacting with each other

ATCONWAY · October 21st, 2010, 02:56 PM

Scott / wrox community:

What is your feeling when 2 different model classes need to interact with each other directly? I looked in the Agathas.Storefront project and the classes within the model didn't really call other classes in the model or instantiate instances of them; only used for exposing as properties, or to use as an argument parameter.

So here is what I am getting at - let's say I have Employee and Payroll Model classes. Employee has an exposed method to provide the Employee's Pay Raise for the year, but gets this info by calling the Payroll class. Currently I make a concrete instance of Payroll from Employee, call the methods that do the calculations and get the result to expose via the Employee class. Does this create a tightly coupled situation? Should the Payroll Model class have an Interface exposing these methods, and make my Employee class work with the Interface instead? I am wondering if the Payroll class ever needs to change, I don't want the Employee class to break too.

I tried to see how you are doing this, but didn't find an exact match. Should I make Payroll implement and Interface and have Employee work with the Interface, or just allow Employee to work directly with Payroll? Or is there a better way all together to explain my simple example. Again this is all within the Model layer.

Thanks!!

elbandit · October 22nd, 2010, 08:31 AM

Heh Allen,

Hmm not sure I follow the example. Wouldn't PayRoll be responsible for issuing pay rises? (I am not sure of the domain as I don't get many pay rises

)

Something like:

Code:

 
puiblic class PayRollSystem
{
     public void IssueAnnualPayriseTo(Employee employee, Manager authorisingManager)
     {
         // Check to see if this employee has been given a payrise this year..

         // Update employee with new salary information.
     }
 
}

Can you write some code so I can get a better understanding?

Cheers
Scott

ATCONWAY · October 22nd, 2010, 02:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elbandit

Heh Allen,

(I am not sure of the domain as I don't get many pay rises

)

Me neither

, but you definitely deserve one!

On the code side, I think where I may have messed up is trying to make the pay raise a method exposed on Employee 'PayRaiseRate()' that calls payroll, where I should probably place that method solely within Payroll and have the employee object passed in. I thought at 1st it was an operation 'on' an employee (get pay raise rate on this employee instance), but I should do the inverse of that like you described.

So there really are not too many times when one Model class directly instantiates a concrete instance of another correct?

elbandit · October 26th, 2010, 04:51 AM

Quote:

So there really are not too many times when one Model class directly instantiates a concrete instance of another correct?

I guess the creation of business entities is the role of the Factory design pattern. You can see in the Basket class that it uses the BasketItemFactory To create an instance of the BasketItem class. http://aspnetdesignpatterns.codeplex.../52644#1004145