Open-Closed principle Revisited

Reference: http://kamalmeet.com/system-design-and-documentation/understanding-openclosed-principle/

Open closed principle states that your classes should be open for extension but closed for modification. One way to look at it is that when you provide a library or a jar file to a system, you can ofcourse use the classes or extend the classes, but you cannot get into the code and update it.

At a principle level, this means you should code in a manner that you never need to update your class once code. One major reason behind this principle is that you have a class which is reviewed and Unit tested, you would not like someone to modify and possibly corrupt the code.

How do I make sure that my class follow open closed principle?

Let’s look at a design of this MyPizza class

public class MyPizza {
public void createPizza(Pizza pizza)
{
if(pizza.type.equals("Cheese"))
{
//create a cheese pizza
}
else if(pizza.type.equals("Veg"))
{
//create a veg pizza
}
}
}

Following pizza type classes use this

class Pizza
{
String type;
}

class CheesePizza extends Pizza{
CheesePizza()
{
this.type=”Cheese”;
}
}

class VegPizza extends Pizza{
VegPizza()
{
this.type=”Veg”;
}
}

The above design clearly violates the open closed principle. What if I need to add a double cheese pizza here. I will have to go to MyPizza class and update it, which is not following “closed for modification” rule.

How can fix this design?

public class MyPizza {
public void createPizza(Pizza pizza)
{
pizza.create();
}
}


class CheesePizza extends Pizza{
CheesePizza()
{
this.type="Cheese";
}

public void create()
{
//do the creation here
}
}

With this simple modification we are making sure that we will need not change the code in MyPizza class even when we will add new types of pizza, as actual responsibility of creation would be with the new class being created (DoubleCheese).