riffrack
asked on
Object-oriented Design & Analysis - Website User - Object Modelling
Hi there
I'm quite new to OOP & am doing my first major project in this area. I've been reading quite a bit & watching loads of tutorials. However I cannot find a "best-pratice" or design pattern for a fairly common scenario. This may be a newbie question, but I hope some of you may have practical experience with this.
The use cases are complted and I have identified the various actors of the system. The website will have the following actors:
- Anonymous visitor (can make a payment or donation without becoming a member)
- EventMember (can create & modify events)
- StandardMember (can sign up for events)
- Administrator
Further there will be some external system "actors" like an analytics system.
Let's say I created a Person superclass and then 4 subclasses for the types of user. There would hardly be anything in common. For the administrator only the name may be stored. The member will need to set all the mandatory fields. The anonymous visitor could be a person or a bot. A visitor may become a member. The various users may share some common methods like search.
Should I create seperate classes for let's say visitor, member (with 2 member sub-types) and administrator. Also would it make sense to create separate classes for the external systems?
How would you model this common actor scenario?
Any help is much appreciated.
Cheers
I'm quite new to OOP & am doing my first major project in this area. I've been reading quite a bit & watching loads of tutorials. However I cannot find a "best-pratice" or design pattern for a fairly common scenario. This may be a newbie question, but I hope some of you may have practical experience with this.
The use cases are complted and I have identified the various actors of the system. The website will have the following actors:
- Anonymous visitor (can make a payment or donation without becoming a member)
- EventMember (can create & modify events)
- StandardMember (can sign up for events)
- Administrator
Further there will be some external system "actors" like an analytics system.
Let's say I created a Person superclass and then 4 subclasses for the types of user. There would hardly be anything in common. For the administrator only the name may be stored. The member will need to set all the mandatory fields. The anonymous visitor could be a person or a bot. A visitor may become a member. The various users may share some common methods like search.
Should I create seperate classes for let's say visitor, member (with 2 member sub-types) and administrator. Also would it make sense to create separate classes for the external systems?
How would you model this common actor scenario?
Any help is much appreciated.
Cheers
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ASKER
Thank you very much for your suggestion. The inheritance model you suggest is exactly what I was considering, however the AnonymousVisitor does not really share any properties with the member. We don't know the name, first, last, email or anything of the AnonymousVisitor. And it could be a bot, hence not a person. What would be adavantages of inheriting the person class?
riffrack