Decorator Pattern

I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can.
                                                 —Franz Schubert

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
—William Wordsworth (Poet and a guy who really understood bandwidth)

The Decorator pattern wasn’t developed with a web designer or developer in mind, but it could well have been. A few years back, we developed a web site and were cognizant that periodically we’d have to update it. The design was set up so that substitution of one element for an updated one was fairly simple, and it required no major change in the code or structure. Because we didn’t have to update it too often, this wasn’t much of a problem. However, had we needed to update elements or features on a fairly regular basis, our design would have left a good deal to be desired.

Imagining situations where you need to update or change certain parts of a web site on a regular basis isn’t difficult. If your client is a retailer with regular advertising such as weekly specials and new products introduced periodically, you want to have flexibility in your web design and structure. You may want to use features of your basic structure that assure change is easily accommodated, but you don’t have to alter the basic structure itself in any way.

The Decorator pattern addresses the issue of maintaining the structure while having the ability to make changes by decorating the different components that make up the application. The decorations are composed of descriptions and/or methods used to wrap different objects in the application. As you will see, this design pattern allows you to mix and match all the different components and decorations to optimize flexibility and expandability, while core structure classes remain unaltered.