Tag Archives: mixin

ReSharper hidden features – Generate Delegating Members

A frequently-used design pattern is the Decorator. This is also known as a mixin (or they might not be the very same thing but certainly they are related).

Typically you might need to create a class that implements a certain interface and uses another class that implements that exact interface but you need to provide some additional feature(s). An example would be a class that adds transactional behavior to an existing data-access class (a naive example) :


public interface IDataAccess
{
    void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user);
}

public class DataAccess : IDataAccess
{
    public void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user)
    {
        InsertInvoice(invoice, user);
        UpdateCustomerDebt(user, invoice.Total);
    }

    // ... the rest of the implementation
}

public class TransactionalDataAccess : IDataAccess
{
    private readonly IDataAccess _dataAccess;

    public TransactionalDataAccess(IDataAccess dataAccess)
    {
        if (dataAccess == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException();
        }
        _dataAccess = dataAccess;
    }

    public void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user)
    {
         using(var tx = new TransactionScope())
         {
             _dataAccess.AddCustomerInvoice(invoice, user);
             tx.Complete();
         }
    }

    // ... the rest of the implementation
}

Another type of example would be the Adapter design pattern. An example would be providing access to a (static) class (that may be out of your control) in a mock-able manner. That is, implement another class, non-static, which implements a defined interface and eases unit-testing :

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