CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ooparchitecture
dawydiuk
dawydiuk

Reputation: 17

OOP design recommendation - REST client with services, each services has methods

I'm writing a client for a REST API for an ERP system(large complicated piece of software). I want to get the design architecture correct now, so I save myself time down the road, hoping you can help. If helpful server side urls are of the format /myServer/v1/someService/someMethod?someParam=x

I started off with a restClient class with public function for all the ERP actions(e.g. restClient->someServiceSomeMethod(someParam)). The restClient knows about authentication, and has private get, post, etc methods. I started with this approach as it's the simplest architecture, although I'm wondering if I should be using inheritance or some other approach(I don't want to overcomplicate but I'm starting to feel like I'm going down the wrong path). For the past 10 years are so I've written mostly procedural code, so I'm a bit rusty on OOP design... Would it be "better" to have classes for each service that inherits the restClient class? The the end code would then instantiate the service object they need then calls the method(someService->someMethod(someParam)? This "feels" like the right way to go, but I'm fuzzy on how I'd authenticate and it's been a long time since I did OOP so would hate to overcomplicate things and get no value out of it.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 235

Answers (1)

Riaan Nel
Riaan Nel

Reputation: 2535

A good rule of thumb for me is that simpler is usually better.

Inheritance, in my opinion, feels a bit restrictive for this - and you introduce coupling that might cause you pain later. If you build 100 different services and they all share a common super class, but it turns out that 5 of them need to be behave in a slightly different fashion, everything else will also be affected. That could get messy.

Although I don't have sufficient detail to understand all the aspects of your particular scenario, I would strongly consider composition over inheritance - build a RestClient class that can deal with some of the common scenarios (auth, GET, POST, etc.), but instead of extending it, just provide a reference to it to anything else that might require that functionality.

In addition, if there are various 'groups' of common operations (e.g CRUD), why not model those with an interface? Your classes could then implement the interface instead of extending a common super class, giving you the benefit of consistency but without the drawbacks of inheritance.

Upvotes: 1

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