AndyDavis3416

Although I would never call that a model, I think that we're doing similar things for similar reasons.

Command, Virtual Model, Verb Model, Interaction. If I were working on your team I am sure we could agree that one of those would do for a name.

Honestly, I was disappointed in his response. With all his harrumphing about real examples, I would have expected him to make an effort to understand a real example. But, as I said elsewhere, the downside of real examples is that they require quite a bit more effort to grasp than contrived ones.

To address your comments:

While it is true that one of the great features (and frequent motivations) for using the Command pattern is the separation of the creation and invocation, it is not the only motivation. The two big payoffs that we are getting are:

- Separation of invocation from the knowledge of how it is carried out

- Composition of complex commands from smaller, simpler commands

There's no requirement that the invoker is never the same as the creator. It's just that most often it isn't, particularly (as you noted) in a worker queue system. That's really just a feature of the implementation that the command readily enables rather than a fundamental property of the pattern. For us, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't; that's not the primary payoff that we're going for.

I can't support the characterization of this as an Adapter. This is fundamentally behavioral. I have a class that represents an action that I want to have happen. All of the places that want this action do not need to know what is involved, they only need to create the command and hand it off/invoke it.

FWIW - I have five different places in my software that create an AssignCaseCommand. - One controller

- Three commands that can create this as a sub command

- A utility job

Plus that simple concept is available to any custom implementation code that we write.

True, the tests do demonstrate what can be accomplished, but that kind of gets back to my point: Any example complex enough to unambiguously warrant the use of a command pattern is going to involve non-trivial effort to learn the context. Asking that effort of someone reading a blog post is a bit much.

Unfortunately, it's easy to dismiss simple examples as not being worth the complexity and demand real examples which can be dismissed because they cannot be easily understood.

Perhaps that's why the OP used a simple example. Complex examples are pretty hard to get your head around at first glance; even sane systems can be perceived as a 'hot mess' upon a quick read without any context.

I disagree that re-assigning a case belongs in the case model. It is a complex interaction between several models. Extracting it to a command object allows all of the rules to be easily understood.

I hope I am not sticking my head into the lion's mouth here, but here (https://gist.github.com/BiggerNoise/9334673) is a link to a gist of some code in one of our apps.

Cases have Tasks and Activities. Activities are always associated with a case, and may be associated with a task.

In the controller, when assigning a case, one would type: AssignCaseCommand.new(params).execute!

The command class implements the Command pattern (the pretty well established name for interactors) and is a Composite as well.

BTW - the same command that assigns the tasks of a case is also used to merely assign a task. And, if we're just recording an activity, we would just use the create activity command.

I think it would be insanity to try and capture the rules associated with re-assigning tasks in the controller. (I am pretty sure that you would agree.)

--Minor Edit for clarity--