Decorator Pattern

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Decorator pattern adds behavior to objects without affecting other objects of the same class. The decorator pattern is a useful alternative to creating sub-classes.

Create a module for each decorator. This approach is more flexible than inheritance because you can mix and match responsibilities in more combinations. Additionally, because the transparency allows decorators to be nested recursively, it allows for an unlimited number of responsibilities.

Assume the Pizza class has a cost method that returns 300:

class Pizza
  def cost
    300
  end
end

Represent pizza with an added layer of cheese burst and the cost goes up by 50. The simplest approach is to create a PizzaWithCheese subclass that returns 350 in the cost method.

class PizzaWithCheese < Pizza
  def cost
    350
  end
end

Next, we need to represent a large pizza that adds 100 to the cost of a normal pizza. We can represent this using a LargePizza subclass of Pizza.

class LargePizza < Pizza
  def cost
    400
  end
end

We could also have an ExtraLargePizza which adds a further cost of 15 to our LargePizza. If we were to consider that these pizza types could be served with cheese, we would need to add LargePizzaWithChese and ExtraLargePizzaWithCheese subclasses.we end up with a total of 6 classes.

To simplify the approach, use modules to dynamically add behavior to Pizza class:

Module + extend + super decorator:->

class Pizza
  def cost
    300
  end
end

module CheesePizza
  def cost
    super + 50
  end
end

module LargePizza
  def cost
    super + 100
  end
end

pizza = Pizza.new         #=> cost = 300
pizza.extend(CheesePizza) #=> cost = 350
pizza.extend(LargePizza)  #=> cost = 450
pizza.cost                #=> cost = 450

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