After reading the great patterns book i was talking about earlier i soon ran into a problem that at first seemed pattern-like but was not after some examination.
The case that we are integrating against a back end AS400 system, via Microsoft Transaction Integrator. The “problem” is that the department that is responsible for the integration is creating a web service for each program (“method”) we are accessing. I brushed on this in an earlier post about naming those web services.
A lot of the stuff we are sending back and forth are equivalent but not the same, for example an header that all methods expect. They are equivalent but not the same since they are located in different namespaces, since the header are generated once for each web service.
So what we wanted was to create an interface that all the headers could implement. To create the interface was not hard. I simply made an interface that declared all the properties of the header. I called the interface… IHeader (duh!)
But to get all the generated header classes to implement IHeader was another thing altogether. Luckily the generated classes of the proxy are partial classes. So we created another partial class with the same name, in the same namespace. That partial class implemented our new interface.
Now we just had on big obstacle to get over; implementing the interface. Implementing interfaces in VB.NET is explicit. That mean that we explicitly had to code the call the underlying implementation, in our partial class, to get the whole thing to work. We are counting on ca 40-50 methods and web service so that would be all lot of dumb code.
Even more stupid is that all the code already is “implemented” since we know that all our header classes has the properties declared by the interface. So we had to do the whole thing in C#, which supports implicit interface implementation (whoa - fancy phase alert). So nice!
The whole thing collapses to a single line of code (excluding namespacestuff). Here is an example: namespace LF.Tjanster.Sak.DataAccess.TI.Migg.ListData.HamtaVerksamheter { public partial class WS_Migg_Header : IHeader { } }
I don’t know if this is a pattern but is sure is nice. By using partial classes and implicit interface implementation (again? I’ll switch to writing books soon…) we solved a quite hard problem in a very nice way.
Now we can treat the headers uniformly by passing an interface instead of an implementation (“Classes are dead. Long live interfaces”).
And we’ll probably use the same trick for exception handling, and logging, and …