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.