Beginner Question

[Marco Paul]

Hello,
I am slowly trying to wrap my head around the dynamics of design patterns, and I was curious if the following makes sense. A class in one of our applications has nothing but helper methods that perform regular expression validations. To me, this code is a little clugy to look at and I was wondering if using a factory would make sense in this scenario. Here is a code example i was thinking:

IRegularExpression expression = RegularExpressionFactory.Create(ExpressionType.Email)
 
bool valid = expression.Validate("[e-mail]")  

does something like this make any sense or am i thinking to hard about this.

Thanks!
[ January 25, 2005: Message edited by: Marco Paul ]

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Marco,
What does the code look like now:

RegularExpression.validateEmail("mpaul.here.com");
 
or
 
EMailRegularExpression expression = new EmailRegularExpression();
 bool valid = expression.Validate("[e-mail]");

Personally, I would leave it alone. These are true utility methods, so I don't see the benefit of abstracting the classname away.

[Marco Paul]

I wasn't the original developer of the class, but here is an example of some of the method definitions in the class:

 
   public static bool IsEmailValid(string email)
   {
      ...
   }
 
   public static bool IsPhoneValid(string phone)
   {
      ...
   }
 
 

[Jeroen Wenting]

I doubt that's Java... It reads like C++

[Udayan Patel]

Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
I doubt that's Java... It reads like C++

No it could be java, when Regular Expressions weren't available.

[Lasse Koskela]

Java? With "bool" and "string"... For me, it has "C#" written all over

[Udayan Patel]

oops, i missed bool and string part. ah! even method names starts with uppercase. Well but then patterns are suppose to be language independent.
[ January 26, 2005: Message edited by: Udayan Patel ]

[Warren Dew]

Marco, if you think about it, your change would replace a single simple statement with two statements wherever a validation was used. That does not seem like and improvement to me, in either C++ or Java.

[Marco Paul]

Thanks all for your help!

[Malli Raman]

Originally posted by Marco Paul:
Hello,
I am slowly trying to wrap my head around the dynamics of design patterns, and I was curious if the following makes sense. A class in one of our applications has nothing but helper methods that perform regular expression validations. To me, this code is a little clugy to look at and I was wondering if using a factory would make sense in this scenario. Here is a code example i was thinking:

IRegularExpression expression = RegularExpressionFactory.Create(ExpressionType.Email)
 
bool valid = expression.Validate("[e-mail]")  

does something like this make any sense or am i thinking to hard about this.

Thanks!

[ January 25, 2005: Message edited by: Marco Paul ]

Factory Pattern is used to return one of any of its sub class objects based on the given condition. I am not sure that your code will fall in this category.