Composition, Aggregation, and Delegation
Composition
Objects can contain other objects in their instance variables, this is known as Object Composition.
Object composition is used to represent “has-a” relationships. Object A “owns” an object B, where B has no meaning or purpose in the system without A.
For example, an object in the Employee class might contain, either directly or through a pointer, an object in the Address class. Every employee has an address, so every Employee object has access to a place to store an Address object (either directly embedded within itself, or at a separate location addressed via a pointer).
Object composition is also an alternative to class inheritance. Here, new functionality is obtained by assembling or composing objects to get more complex functionality. This requires that the objects being composed have well-defined interfaces, no internal details of objects are visible.
Aggregation
Object aggregation is used to represent “uses” relationships. Object A “uses” an object B, where B exists independently (conceptually) from A.
Composition vs Aggregation
Composition an aggregation are usually confused.
Simple rules:
- A “owns” B = Composition : B has no meaning or purpose in the system without A
- A “uses” B = Aggregation : B exists independently (conceptually) from A
A Company is an aggregation of People and a composition of Accounts. When a Company ceases to do business its Accounts cease to exist but its People continue to exist.
Delegation
Make composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance. In delegation, two objects are involved in handling a request: a receiving object delegates operations to its delegate. This is analogous to subclasses deferring requests to parent classes, but with inheritance, an inherited operation can always refer to the receiving object through the this member in C++ for example. To achieve the same effect with delegation, the receiver passes itself to the delegate to let the delegated operation refer to the receiver.
For example, instead of making class Window a subclass of Rectangle (because windows happen to be rectangular), the Window class might reuse the behavior of Rectangle by keeping a Rectangle instance variable and delegating Rectangle-specific behavior to it. Window must now forward requests to its Rectangle instance explicitly, whereas before it would have inherited those operations.
The main advantage of delegation is that it makes easy to compose behaviors at runtime and to change the way they’re composed. Our window can become circular at run-time simply by replacing its Rectangle instance with a Circle instance, assuming they have the same type.
Delegation has a disadvantage it shares with other techniques that make software more flexible through object composition: dynamic, highly parameterized software is harder to understand than more static software. There are also run-time inefficiences, but the human inefficiencies are more important in the long run. Delegation is only a good design choice when it simplifies more than it complicates.