Behavioral Patterns - Visitor Pattern Exercise

The Visitor Pattern represents an operation to be performed on elements of an object structure. Visitor lets you define a new operation without changing the classes of the elements on which it operates. In this exercise, we will create a bookstore inventory structure that collects books, movies, and music. We will add shared behaviors across this hierarchical structure by using the Visitor Pattern.

Reading Materials

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern (15 minutes reading)

Practice Materials

1. Use the Visitor Pattern to create a bookstore inventory that meets the following requirements:

• the bookstore inventory collects books, movies, and music.
• all these three media types have their own members and one common member - title
• add one behavior to the media so that the operation can print out all the titles.
• add second behavior to the media so that the operation can print out details of all media and the total count of media while the media is traversed.

Components:

1. Visitor Interface (The operation that is shared across visited elements) - MediaVisitor
2. Element Interface (The hierarchical structure that accepts the operation from a visitor) - Media
3. Concrete Elements (The elements in the hierarchical structure that will be visited) - Book, Movie, Music
4. Concrete Visitors (Each visitor will define one type of operation) - TitlePrintingVisitor, DetailPrintingVisitor
5. Iterator for traversal (The root structure that holds the references to all the sub-elements) - Inventory

Tips

• Visitors can have their own internal state to keep track of the elements they visit.

Solution

Bookstore Inventory Example

Questions to discuss

1. What are the common use cases to apply the Template Method Pattern?
2. What are the two major disadvantages of the Visitor Pattern?

• Break Encapsulation
• Difficult to add more subclasses to the hierarchical structure