Question

I want to ask a question about how you would approach a simple object-oriented design problem. I have a few ideas of my own about what the best way of tackling this scenario, but I would be interested in hearing some opinions from the Stack Overflow community. Links to relevant online articles are also appreciated. I’m using C#, but the question is not language specific.

Suppose I am writing a video store application whose database has a Person table, with PersonId, Name, DateOfBirth and Address fields. It also has a Staff table, which has a link to a PersonId, and a Customer table which also links to PersonId.

A simple object oriented approach would be to say that a Customer ‘is a’ Person and therefore create classes a bit like this:

class Person {     public int PersonId { get; set; }     public string Name { get; set; }     public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; }     public string Address { get; set; } }  class Customer : Person {     public int CustomerId { get; set; }     public DateTime JoinedDate { get; set; } }  class Staff : Person {     public int StaffId { get; set; }     public string JobTitle { get; set; } } 

Now we can write a function say to send emails to all customers:

static void SendEmailToCustomers(IEnumerable<Person> everyone) {      foreach(Person p in everyone)         if(p is Customer)             SendEmail(p); } 

This system works fine until we have someone who is both a customer and a member of staff. Assuming that we don’t really want our everyone list to have the same person in twice, once as a Customer and once as a Staff, do we make an arbitrary choice between:

class StaffCustomer : Customer { ... 

and

class StaffCustomer : Staff { ... 

Obviously only the first of these two would not break the SendEmailToCustomers function.

So what would you do?

• Make the Person class have optional references to a StaffDetails and CustomerDetails class?
• Create a new class that contained a Person, plus optional StaffDetails and CustomerDetails?
• Make everything an interface (e.g. IPerson, IStaff, ICustomer) and create three classes that implemented the appropriate interfaces?
• Take another completely different approach?

Answer 1

Mark, This is an interesting question. You will find as many opinions on this. I don’t believe there is a ‘right’ answer. This is a great example of where a rigid heirarchial object design can really cause problems after a system is built.

For example, lets say you went with the ‘Customer’ and ‘Staff’ classes. You deploy your system and everything is happy. A few weeks later, someone points out that they are both ‘on staff’ and a ‘customer’ and they are not getting customer emails. In this case, you have a lot of code changes to make (re-design, not re-factor).

I believe it would be overly complex and difficult to maintain if you attempt to have a set of derived classes that implement all the permutations and combination of people and their roles. This is especially true given that the above example is very simple – in most real applications, things will be more complex.

For your example here, I would go with ‘Take another completely different approach’. I would implement the Person class and include in it a collection of ‘roles’. Each person could have one or more roles such as ‘Customer’, ‘Staff’, and ‘Vendor’.

This will make it easier to add roles as new requirements are discovered. For example, you may simply have a base ‘Role’ class, and derive new roles from them.