Question

This class injects all dependencies in the constructor, but only one of the dependencies are used at a time. Is this considered bad design?

public class OrderPayment
{
    ICreditCardPayment _ccPayment;
    ICashPayment _cashPayment;

    public OrderPayment(ICreditCardPayment ccPayment, ICashPayment cashPayment)
    {
        _ccPayment = ccPayment;
        _cashPayment = cashPayment;
    }

    private void PrepareOrder(Order order)
    {
        // Do stuff with the order
    }

    public PaymentResult PayByCreditCard(Order order)
    {
        PrepareOrder(order);
        return _ccPayment.Pay(order);
    }

    public PaymentResult PayByCreditCard(Order order)
    {
        PrepareOrder(order);
        return _cashPayment.Pay(order);
    }   
}

An alternative is this:

public class OrderPayment
{
    private void PrepareOrder(Order order)
    {
        // Do stuff with the order
    }

    public PaymentResult PayByCreditCard(Order order, ICreditCardPayment ccPayment)
    {
        PrepareOrder(order);
        return ccPayment.Pay(order);
    }

    public PaymentResult PayByCreditCard(Order order, ICashPayment cashPayment)
    {
        PrepareOrder(order);
        return cashPayment.Pay(order);
    }   
}

This one complicates the function call somewhat. Would you use the first, cleaner looking one, even though not every constructor parameter is used? Considering a DI framework has to instantiate potentially heavy classes even though they may not all be used, I’m not sure how good this is.

So which one would you use? Or maybe a different implementation?

Answer 1

I would refactor or extract a common interface from ICashPayment and ICreditCardPayment. Your code sample indicates your methods are both invoking xPayment.Pay, which looks like a good candidate for your common interface method.

public interface IPayment 
{
    PaymentResult Pay(Order order);
}

Your more specialized interfaces can inherit from and build upon it.

In general, I would avoid having constructors (or any method) accept arguments that go unused, or if one argument is used, the other is not. That’s normally an indication that you are either not operating at the proper level of abstraction, or that your class/method has too many responsibilities.