Separating Service Logic from Data

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I have been looking over a couple of classes I have in an android project, and I realized that I have been mixing logic with data. Having realized how bad this can be to the readability and the test-ability of my project, I decided to do some refactoring in order to abstract away all services logic to separate services modules. However, since I have been relying on Java's polymorphism, I got lost and need some guidance.

Suppose I have this "to-be-changed" layout for a super data class, and two sub-classes:

public class DataItem {
    /* some variables */ 

    public saveToDB(/* Some Arguments */) {
        /* do some stuff */
    }

    public render() {
        /* render the class */
    }
}

public class ChildDataItemA extends DataItem {
    @Override
    public saveToDB(/* Some Arguments */) {
        super.saveToDB(); 
        /* more specific logic to ChildDataItemA */
    }

    @Override
    public render() {
        /* render logic for ChildDataItemA */
    }
}

public class ChildDataItemB extends DataItem {
    @Override
    public saveToDB(/* Some Arguments */) {
        super.saveToDB(); 
        /* more specific logic to ChildDataItemB */
    }

    @Override
    public render() {
        /* render logic for ChildDataItemB */
    }
}

Now, I thought about moving the saveToDB() and render() methods to a service class. However, sometimes I need to be able to call these method into instance of compiled type DataItem without knowing its runtime type. For instance, I might want to make the following call:

List<DataItem> dataList; 
for (DataItem item: dataList) {
    item.saveToDB();
    item.render();
}

Additionally, I thought of doing the following:

public class ChildDataItemB extends DataItem {
    @Override
    public saveToDB(/* Some Arguments */) {
        super.saveToDB(); 
        /* more specific logic to ChildDataItemB */
         Service.saveToDBB();
    }

    @Override
    public render() {
        /* render logic for ChildDataItemB */
        Service.renderB();
    }
}

Where I still keep 'dummy' methods in each subclass that would call an appropriate service method. However, I do not think that this really achieves the separation I want since data classes will still know about services (bad!).

Any ideas on how to solve this?

Edit: Note that render() and saveToDB() are just generic examples of what these methods can be, so the problem is not really about choosing an ORM or SQL related techniques.

5 Answers
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