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In my project I have defined an interface to describe the methods that each of my different database connection classes must have. This is called IDatabaseConnectivityObject. Each of my classes implements this interface to make sure that they all contain the same methods for running queries, making connections etc etc.
Consider the following code:
IDatabaseConnectivityObject adoDataBaseConnection = new DbProviderFactoryConnection();
DbProviderFactoryConnection adoDataBaseConnection = new DbProviderFactoryConnection();
Will the above lines both behave the same? If so why? If not then why not? What are the benefits of both?
It may be a really stupid question but I havent used interfaces all that long and I am not sure what line 1 does. It was my understanding that you couldnt make an instance of an interface as it merely defines behaviour so how is that line possible?
Will the above lines both behave the same? If so why?
At runtime yes. The difference is that if you declare the variable of type IDatabaseConnectivityObject then at compile time you will be able to see only the members of this interface on the variable. If on the other hand you declare it as DbProviderFactoryConnection then you will see all the members of this class.
As a good practice it is recommended to always work with the highest possible type in the hierarchy when declaring the variable (IDatabaseConnectivityObject in this case) which allows you to access all members that the consumer will need.
The first would allow you to swap in a different implementation of you IDatabaseConnectivityObject moving forward.
This is a good practice as it allows your system to be more resistant to change moving forward. Keeping the cost of change low is key.
Interfaces define the contract that consumers can rely on, the API if you will. The two lines are functionally the same if you intend to use members that are present on the interface.
Using the interface just expresses that you don't care how something is implemented, just that it is implemented to contract. Interfaces also promote Loose Coupling.
The benefit of programming against an interface is that you are programming against the "agreement" and not the "execution", or the contract and not the implementation. This has a large positive impact on testing as you can mock or stub interfaces during tests to reduce the number of extraneous dependencies in a test scenario.
A similar benefit to above is that using interfaces along with something like the factory pattern, IoC, or DI you can provide different implementations of the interface on the fly - for example, a different business logic handler for a different customer.
Another benefit is that it helps get around the lack of multiple inheritance. Most things can be expressed nicely via interfaces, and classes can implement multiple interfaces.
You've asked for benefits.
When you are programming against interfaces (and are using factories to create the concrete types) this makes unit-testing easier as you can mock the instance that is put into the logic (unit).
This is actually a 'Design Pattern Principle':
"Program to an 'interface', not an 'implementation'." (Gang of Four 1995:18)
I am increasingly seeing examples of this style. This happens irrespective of whether the interface is ever likely to be needed. In other case, the adoption of new interfaces prove helpful. However, it cannot always be predicted whether it will be used or not but a new interfaces are created for new properties to conform to... Best practice or not?
As usual, it depends. If you're writing a public API, this approach is extremely powerful. An example of this is the Progistics / Connectship API. At the time that I used it, there was a single concrete class. The rest of the public interface was all interfaces. They were able to rip out the entire implementation of the product and rewrite it, leaving the interfaces untouched.
Of course, there is a cost associated with this. You have to put a lot of up front time and effort into making an elegant API if you're going to want to cast it in stone (of course, this is the case whether you choose to use interfaces or not).
On the other hand, if you're writing the data access layer for an internal business application, you might not reap as many rewards.
In theory, you should have an interface or abstract class for any class that contains business logic - so you can unit test it and/or easily swap implementations. Classes that are used to represent data - model classes - don't have to implement an interface to be a "best practice" (it has to end somewhere).
I'd have to go with the Extreme Programming and YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it) practice. Only extract the interface when you need it for another class. Otherwise, it's just adding overhead.
The exception, of course, is when you need to add a Mock object into your testing scheme, and subclassing doesn't achieve what you want.
This topic is related to Emergent Design. I consider it to be the mark of excellent designers.
I'd say NOT. If familiar objects share a property, then create the interface. If the need arises then create the interfaces. I think that creating interfaces by default for all properties creates too much overhead.
I have seen code where every class has an interface that it implements.
Sometimes there is no common interface for them all.
They are just there and they are used instead of concrete objects.
They do not offer a generic interface for two classes and are specific to the domain of the problem that the class solves.
Is there any reason to do that?
No.
Interfaces are good for classes with complex behaviour, and are especially handy if you want to be able to create a mock or fake implementation class of that interface for use in unit tests.
But, some classes don't have a lot of behaviour and can be treated more like values and usually consist of a set of data fields. There's little point in creating interfaces for classes like this because doing so would introduce unnecessary overhead when there's little point in mocking or providing alternative implementations of the interface. For example, consider a class:
class Coordinate
{
public Coordinate( int x, int y);
public int X { get; }
public int y { get; }
}
You're unlikely to want an interface ICoordinate to go with this class, because there's little point in implementing it in any other way than simply getting and setting X and Y values.
However, the class
class RoutePlanner
{
// Return a new list of coordinates ordered to be the shortest route that
// can be taken through all of the passed in coordinates.
public List<Coordinate> GetShortestRoute( List<Coordinate> waypoints );
}
you probably would want an IRoutePlanner interface for RoutePlanner because there are many different algorithms that could be used for planning a route.
Also, if you had a third class:
class RobotTank
{
public RobotTank( IRoutePlanner );
public void DriveRoute( List<Coordinate> points );
}
By giving RoutePlanner an interface, you could write a test method for RobotTank that creates one with a mock RoutePlanner that just returns a list of coordinates in no particular order. This would allow the test method to check that the tank navigates correctly between the coordinates without also testing the route planner. This means you can write a test that just tests one unit (the tank), without also testing the route planner.
You'll see though, it's quite easy to feed real Coordinates in to a test like this without needing to hide them behind an ICoordinate interface.
After revisiting this answer, I've decided to amend it slightly.
No, it's not best practice to extract interfaces for every class. This can actually be counterproductive. However, interfaces are useful for a few reasons:
Test support (mocks, stubs).
Implementation abstraction (furthering onto IoC/DI).
Ancillary things like co- and contra-variance support in C#.
For achieving these goals, interfaces are considered good practice (and are actually required for the last point). Depending on the project size, you will find that you may never need talk to an interface or that you are constantly extracting interfaces for one of the above reasons.
We maintain a large application, some parts of it are great and some are suffering from lack of attention. We frequently find ourselves refactoring to pull an interface out of a type to make it testable or so we can change implementations whilst lessening the impact of that change. We also do this to reduce the "coupling" effect that concrete types can accidentally impose if you are not strict on your public API (interfaces can only represent a public API so for us inherently become quite strict).
That said, it is possible to abstract behaviour without interfaces and possible to test types without needing interfaces, so they are not a requirement to the above. It is just that most frameworks / libraries that you may use to support you in those tasks will operate effectively against interfaces.
I'll leave my old answer for context.
Interfaces define a public contract. People implementing interfaces have to implement this contract. Consumers only see the public contract. This means the implementation details have been abstracted away from the consumer.
An immediate use for this these days is Unit Testing. Interfaces are easy to mock, stub, fake, you name it.
Another immediate use is Dependency Injection. A registered concrete type for a given interface is provided to a type consuming an interface. The type doesn't care specifically about the implementation, so it can abstractly ask for the interface. This allows you to change implementations without impacting lots of code (the impact area is very small so long as the contract stays the same).
For very small projects I tend not to bother, for medium projects I tend to bother on important core items, and for large projects there tends to be an interface for almost every class. This is almost always to support testing, but in some cases of injected behaviour, or abstraction of behaviour to reduce code duplication.
Let me quote OO guru, Martin Fowler, to add some solid justification to the most common answer in this thread.
This excerpt comes from the "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" (enlisted in the "classics of programming" and\or the "every dev must read" book category).
[Pattern] Separated Interface
(...)
When to Use It
You use Separated Interface when you need to break a dependency between two parts of the system.
(...)
I come across many developers who have separate interfaces for every class they write. I think this is excessive, especially for
application development. Keeping separate interfaces and
implementations is extra work, especially since you often need factory
classes (with interfaces and implementations) as well. For
applications I recommend using a separate interface only if you want
to break a dependency or you want to have multiple independent
implementations. If you put the interface and implementation
together and need to separate them later, this is a simple refactoring
that can be delayed until you need to do it.
Answering your question: no
I've seen some of the "fancy" code of this type myself, where developer thinks he's SOLID, but instead is unintelligible, difficult to extend and too complex.
There's no practical reason behind extracting Interfaces for each class in your project. That'd be an over-kill. The reason why they must be extracting interfaces would be the fact that they seem to implement an OOAD principle "Program to Interface, not to Implementation". You can find more information about this principle with an example here.
Having the interface and coding to the interface makes it a ton easier to swap out implementations. This also applies with unit testing. If you are testing some code that uses the interface, you can (in theory) use a mock object instead of a concrete object. This allows your test to be more focused and finer grained.
It is more common from what I have seen to switch out implementations for testing (mocks) then in actual production code. And yes it is wroth it for unit testing.
I like interfaces on things that could be implemented two different ways, either in time or space, i.e. either it could be implemented differently in the future, or there are 2 different code clients in different parts of the code which may want a different implementation.
The original writer of your code might have just been robo coding, or they were being clever and preparing for version resilience, or preping for unit testing. More likely the former because version resilience an uncommon need-- (i.e. where the client is deployed and can't be changed and a component will be deployed that must be compatible with the existing client)
I like interfaces on things that are dependencies worth isolation from some other code I plan to test. If these interfaces weren't created to support unit tests either, then I'm not sure they're such a good idea. Interface have a cost to maintain and when it comes time to make an object swappable with another, you might want to have an interface apply to only a few methods (so more classes can implement the interface), it might be better to use an abstract class (so that default behaviors can be implemented in an inheritance tree).
So pre-need interfaces is probably not a good idea.
If is a part of the Dependency Inversion principle. Basically code depends on the interfaces and not on the implementations.
This allows you to easy swap the implementations in and out without affecting the calling classes. It allows for looser coupling which makes maintenance of the system much easier.
As your system grows and gets more complex, this principle keeps making more and more sense!
I don't think it's reasonable for Every class.
It's a matter of how much reuse you expect from what type of a component. Of course, you have to plan for more reuse (without the need to do major refactoring later) than you are really going to use at the moment, but extracting an abstract interface for every single class in a program would mean you have less classes than needed.
Interfaces define a behaviour. If you implement one or more interfaces then your object behaves like the one or other interfaces describes. This allows loose coupling between classes. It is really useful when you have to replace an implementation by another one. Communication between classes shall always be done using interfaces excepting if the classes are really tightly bound to each other.
There might be, if you want to be sure to be able to inject other implementations in the future. For some (maybe most) cases, this is overkill, but it is as with most habits - if you're used to it, you don't loos very much time doing it. And since you can never be sure what you'll want to replace in the future, extracting an interface on every class does have a point.
There is never only one solution to a problem. Thus, there could always be more than one implementation of the same interface.
It might seem silly, but the potential benefit of doing it this way is that if at some point you realize there's a better way to implement a certain functionality, you can just write a new class that implements the same interface, and change one line to make all of your code use that class: the line where the interface variable is assigned.
Doing it this way (writing a new class that implements the same interface) also means you can always switch back and forth between old and new implementations to compare them.
It may end up that you never take advantage of this convenience and your final product really does just use the original class that was written for each interface. If that's the case, great! But it really didn't take much time to write those interfaces, and had you needed them, they would've saved you a lot of time.
The interfaces are good to have since you can mock the classes when (unit-) testing.
I create interfaces for at least all classes that touches external resources (e.g. database, filesystem, webservice) and then write a mock or use a mocking framework to simulate the behavior.
Why do you need interfaces? Think practically and deeply. Interfaces are not really attached to classes, rather they are attached to services. The goal of interface is what you allow others to do with your code without serving them the code. So it relates to the service and its management.
See ya
I am in the process of converting all my parameters, return types, classes to all use Interfaces instead ie. IUser instead of User.
Besides the extra code required to maintain this, are their any negatives to this approach?
This isn't an uncommon approach, especially if you do a lot of mocking; however, it has issues with:
data-binding support (especially when adding rows to tables)
xml serialization (including comms WCF, asmx, etc), or contract-based serialization in general
You need to figure out whether the advantages of mocking etc outweigh these issues. It might be that you use IUser in most scenarios, but (for example) at the comms layer it may be simpler to use raw DTOs rather than interfaces.
Note that I'm applying the above to classes. If you involve structs, then remember that in most cases this will involve boxing too.
Overall, this will give you all the advantages associated with loose coupling, so in general I consider this a huge win. However, since you asked about disadvantages, here are some minor ones I can think of:
There's more code involved becase you have both the interface declaration and at least one implementation (you already mentioned this, so I'm just including it for completeness sake).
It becomes more difficult to navigate the code because you can't just Go to Definition to review what another method does (although I'm told that Resharper helps in this regard).
In some cases there may be more in a contract than mere semantics, and an interface can't capture that. The classic example from the BCL is that if you implement IList, you must increment the Count property every time you add an item. However, nothing in the interface forces you, as a developer, to do this. In such cases, abstract base classes may be worth considering instead.
Interfaces are brittle when it comes to adding new members. Once again, you may consider abstract base classes instead.
I once went through a phase of this, but in practice found that for anemic data objects (i.e. POCOs) the interfaces weren't required.
In practice it can be useful to have interfaces to define a contract for behaviour, but not necessarily for attributes.
In general I'd suggest you let your unit testing guide you. If you have rich objects throughout your application then you'll most likely need interfaces. If you have POCOs, you most likely will only need them for controller-style classes.
Interfaces are very good thing, but applying them to all artifacts is overkill. Especially in java you would end up with two distinct files (interface + implementation). So (as always), it really depends :)
Regarding 'interface or not-to-interface'
I would not have domain-objects have interfaces (e.g. User). In my view for code comprehension it is rather confusing (for domain objects interface often would define getter methods). Recently it was a real pain to get unit-tests in place and having domain-object-interfaces. I had to mock all these getters and getting test-data into the domain-object mocks was rather cumbersome.
The opposite is true for coarse grained services and api interfaces. For them I always have an interface from start on.
In more internal-module encapsulated scenarios I start without interface and after some code-evolution if necessary react and do an extract-interface refactoring.
'I' prefix for interface artifact names
I also used to work with the Ixxx prefix but I (happily) got rid of it nowadays for following reasons:
It is difficult to keep up all this 'I' naming convention in an evolving codebase, especially if you refactor a lot (extract-interface, collapse-interface etc.)
For client code it should be transparent whether the type is interface or class based
The 'I' can make you lazy about good interface and classnames.
Not so much a disadvantage but a warning. You would find that to achieve good component de-coupling you will need to use a Dependency Injection framework (that is if you want to keep your sanity and have some sort of idea what your interfaces map to).
What also tends to happen is that non-trivial classes sometimes naturally convert into more than one interface. This is especially true when you have public static methods (i.e. User.CreateAdminUser). You will also find that it's harder to get an interface to hold state AND do stuff. It's frequently more natural for an interface to be either one or the other.
If you get stuck in the process, do take a minute a do some research into what's an appropriate paradigm that you are trying to implement. Chances are someone has solved this particular design pattern before. Considering this is a big refactoring job, you might as well take extra time and do it properly.
avoid the ISuck prefix.
edit: the ISuck convention is a manifestation of the Systems Hungarian notation applied to type names.
Ok the great thing about programming to an interface is that it allows you to interchange specific classes as long as the new classes implement everything in that interface.
e.g. i program my dataSource object to an interface so i can change it between an xml reader and a sql database reader.
does this mean ideally every class should be programmed to an interface?
when is it not a good idea to use an interface?
When the YAGNI principle applies.
Interfaces are great but it's up to you to decide when the extra time it takes developing one is going to pay off. I've used interfaces plenty of times but there are far more situations where they are completely unnecessary.
Not every class needs to be flexibly interchanged with some other class. Your system design should identify the points where modules might be interchangeable, and use interfaces accordingly. It would be silly to pair every class with an additional interface file if there's no chance of that class ever being part of some functional group.
Every interface you add to your project adds complexity to the codebase. When you deal with interfaces, discoverability of how the program works is harder, because it's not always clear which IComponent is filling in for the job when consumer code is dealing with the interface explicitly.
IMHO, you should try to use interfaces a lot. It's easier to be wrong by not using an interface than by using it.
My main argument on this is because interfaces help you make a more testable code. If a class constructor or a method has a concrete class as a parameter, it is harder (specially in c#, where no free mocking frameworks allow mocking non-virtual methods of concrete classes) for you to make your tests that are REAL unit tests.
I believe that if you have a DTO-like object, than it's overkill to use an interface, once mocking it may be maybe even harder than creating one.
If you're not testing, using dependency injection, inversion of control; and expect never to do any of these (please, avoid being there hehe), then I'd suggest interfaces to be used whenever you will really need to have different implementations, or you want to limit the visibility one class has over another.
Use an interface when you expect to need different behaviours used in the same context. I.e. if your system needs one customer class which is well defined, you probably don't need to use an ICustomer interface. But if you expect a class to comply to a certain behaviour s.a. "object can be saved" which applies to different knids of objects then you shoudl have the class implement an ISavable interface.
Another good reason to use an interface is if you expect different implementations of one kind of object. For example if ypu plan an SMS-Gateway which will route SMS's through several different third-party services, your classes should probably implent a common interface s.a. ISmsGatewayAdapter so your core system is independent from the specific implementation you use.
This also leads to 'dependecy injection' which is a technique to further decouple your classes and which is best implemented by using interfaces
The real question is: what does your class DO? If you're writing a class that actually implements an interface somewhere in the .NET framework, declare it as such! Almost all simple library classes will fit that description.
If, instead, you're writing an esoteric class used only in your application and that cannot possibly take any other form, then it makes no sense to talk about what interfaces it implements.
Starting from the premise of, "should I be implementing an interface?" is flawed. You neither should be nor shouldn't be. You should simply be writing the classes you need, and declaring what they do as you go, including what interfaces they implement.
I prefer to code as much as possible against an interface. I like it because I can use a tool like StructureMap to say "hey...get me an instance of IWidget" and it does the work for me. But by using a tool like this I can programatically or by configuration specify which instance is retrieved. This means that when I am testing I can load up a mock object that conforms to an interface, in my development environment I can load up a special local cache, when I am in production I can load up a caching farm layer, etc. Programming against an interface provides me a lot more power than not programming against an interface. Better to have and not need than need and not have applies here very well. And if you are into SOLID programming the easiest way to achieve many of those principles sort of begins by programming against an interface.
As a general rule of thumb, I think you're better off overusing interfaces a bit than underusing them a bit. Err on the side of interface use.
Otherwise, YAGNI applies.
If you are using Visual Studio, it takes about two seconds to take your class and extract an interface (via the context menu). You can then code to that interface, and hardly any time was spent.
If you are just doing a simple project, then it may be overkill. But on medium+ size projects, I try to code to interfaces throughout the project, as it will make future development easier.