Introduction
This is just an attempt to make the audience understand the open/closed principle going through step by step refactoring to ultimately coming up with best design adhering OCP.
Open/Closed principle (OCP) states "Software entities should be open for extension and closed for modification".
Background
We were working on a project where we were using Oracle as the prime repository until one fine day our technical lead came up and announced that our application should support SQL Server as another data source.
Now our Data access layer had a DBConnection
class with a connect method strongly bound to accept Oracle provider and establish a connection.
I ignored the detailed implementation and tried to keep things simple.
Initial Code
As we were in a hurry for the delivery, we could only come up with this design for the existingdbConnection
class so that it now supports SQL provider too.
After Refactoring
OMG ! We designed something wrong ...
Here if you can see from the above code, we are modifying the class DBConnection rather than extending it by including if else statements, this simply is against OCP.
Reason is simple if tomorrow another provider is introduced, again we have to make changes to the DBconnection
class.
Ultimate refactoring ...
Finally the main
method ....
Conclusion
The above design we could come up seems to adhere to OCP.
Now tomorrow if we have to support another Data source, we can easily do it by simply extending IDBConnection
needless to make any changes to DBConnection
.
So the entities are now open for extension and closed for modification.
Happy Coding.