SOLID - Single Responsibility Principle

Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is the first amongst the five design principles stipulated by SOLID.

Single Responsibility Principle

A class should have one and only one reason to change, meaning that a class should only have one job.

Let’s understand better with an example

Lets take an example of a journal. We could write code to implement a personal journal as follows…

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace SOLIDPrinciples.SingleResponsibilityPrinciple
{
    public class Journal
    {
        private readonly List<string> entries = new List<string>();

        private static int count =0;

        public int AddEntry(string text)
        {
            System.Console.WriteLine($"{++count}: {text}");
            return count;
        }

        public void RemoveEntry(int index)
        {
            entries.RemoveAt(index);
        }

        public override string ToString()
        {
            return string.Join(Environment.NewLine, entries);
        }
    }
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Journal journalEntries = new Journal();
            journalEntries.AddEntry("I had a good time yesterday with family");
            journalEntries.AddEntry("Today was a busy day filled with work");
            System.Console.WriteLine(journalEntries.ToString());
        }
    }
}

As shown in the code, our class Journal has methods to add and remove entries from it. So far our Journal class is behaving as required - with a single responsibility. Now, consider the case where we want to extend this by being able to save the journal entries in a file (persist data). We’ll add the following 2 methods to the Journal class.

//Extending the class
public void SaveToFile(string fileName)
{
    File.WriteAllText(fileName, ToString());
}

public Journal Load(string fileName)
{
    //Code to read from file, populate the Journal object and return it
}

Now these 2 methods definitely help adding a persistence layer, however they violate the SRP principle. Here in addition to saving and removing entries from the Journal, the Journal has to also manage persistence. This means that there are more than one reasons for a change to this class which violates the SRP principle (as per which there should be only one reason for change in a class).

Hence, to adhere to SRP we can tackle the above in a different way. We will create a new class Persistence as follows…

public class Persistence
{
    public void SaveToFile(string fileName, Journal journal, bool overwrite = false)
    {
        if(overwrite || !string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileName))
            File.WriteAllText(fileName, journal.ToString());
    }
}

This class can now be instantiated and called from the main method as follows…

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Journal journalEntries = new Journal();
        journalEntries.AddEntry("I had a good time yesterday with family");
        journalEntries.AddEntry("Today was a busy day filled with work");
        System.Console.WriteLine(journalEntries.ToString());

        string fileName = "c:\file.txt";
        Persistence persist = new Persistence();
        persist.SaveToFile(fileName, journalEntries, true);

    }
}

As is now evident, henceforth if any changes are required in the persistence layer it will not require the Journal class to be modified and hence SRP will not be violated.

Sundeep Kamath

SOLID - Single Responsibility Principle

Single Responsibility Principle

Let’s understand better with an example

References