Question

Are there any patterns/solutions to solve the problem of having an API call which in one scenario may need to return a full object graph (say a manager object and all it’s staff relations) and in another may just return a single manager object?

The ideas we’re currently passing around are:

1. Many methods
   In the example above you’d have one method called get_manager() and another called get_manager_deep().
2. Many objects
   Similar to 1. you have two methods, one returns a manager and one returns a manager_with_staff
3. Data-driven API
   Here the method accepts some kind of query (maybe XML) which defines exactly what kind of object you want back, and the method returns perhaps a dynamic object matching the query.

NB. These examples are very simplified, in reality the methods may need to specify where parts of the data comes from – ActiveDirectory/DB.

Anyone ever come across problems like this?

EDIT – Main driving force of the design is to have a clean and simple (but effective) API and object model. So some of the above examples result in potentially large (and possibly confusing) object graphs. Having too many (hopefully unnecessary) methods/classes can be a maintenance problem.

Answer 1

You should try creating one according to your needs.. you just need two concepts..
1. Method Chaining
2. Recursion

A really good article of what Method Chaining is at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_chaining

Regards.