Question

I’m involved in an application migration project. This application is supposed to execute some logic based on the current user role, so this snippets like this are everywhere in the code:

if ("Role1".equals(user.getUserRole())){
    operationVersionForRole1();
} else if ("Role2".equals(user.getRole())){
    operationVersionForRole2();  
} else if ("Role3".equals(user.getRole())){
    operationVersionForRole3();
}

There are about five roles and almost fifty operations, and some operations are very complex for some roles (almost 1000 lines of code) so that style of programming makes the source code messy and hard to follow. Is there any know design pattern that helps to organize source code in that situations? Nested “if-else” just doesn’t feel right.

Answer 1

Isn’t it a Abstract Factory that provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete class? Specified role will be an argument to create concrete implementation. And operationVersionForRoleX could be designed as different implementation or strategy of IOperation interface.

interface IOperation  
{ 
    void Execute();
}

class OperationVersionForRoleX : IOperation
{
    public void Execute()
    {
        // …
    }
}

string role = "roleX";
IOperation operation = operationFactory.Create(role);
operation.Execute();