[ Design Patterns ] - Factory pattern with Golang

Ha Noi, on Thursday 01/04/2023

At the moment, a little speech to give to the present...

I miss Ha Noi's autumn. Sometimes, I hung out with her on all the streets in Ha Noi. We hugged, and she said to me: "I love you". Ha Noi is the best beauty in the older days that we love us...

I. Factory Pattern

Factory Method is a creational design pattern that provides an interface for creating objects in a superclass, but allows subclasses to alter the type of objects that will be created.

Reference: Factory Pattern

II. Implement

1. The Problem

We need to build a system for detecting animal sounds. The input will be the animal and the output will return the sound of the animal.

Example:

The cat will say "meow meow"
The Dog will say "gauw gauw"

2. The Problem Solving

The first version of your app can only handle sound from the cat, so the bulk of your code lives inside the Animal class.

When we need to implement a new animal, we will update its codebase. Moreover, if later you decide to add another animal to the app, you will probably need to make all of these changes again.

As a result, you will end up with some pretty nasty code, riddled with conditionals that switch the app’s behavior depending on the class of animal objects.

So, to resolve the problem, we will use the Factory Pattern.

3. Implement Factory Pattern

3.1. Factory

ianimal_factory.go

package factory

type IAnimalFactory interface {
	GetSound() string
}

animal_factory.go

package factory

import (
	"errors"

	"design-pattern-golang-example/factory_pattern/concrete"
	"design-pattern-golang-example/factory_pattern/constants"
)

type AnimalFactory struct {
	Cat *concrete.Cat
	Dog *concrete.Dog
	Rat *concrete.Rat
}

func (af *AnimalFactory) GetAnimalFactory(name string) (IAnimalFactory, error) {
	if name == constants.CAT {
		return af.Cat, nil
	} else if name == constants.DOG {
		return af.Dog, nil
	} else if name == constants.RAT {
		return af.Rat, nil
	}

	return nil, errors.New("getting animal factory is failed")
}

3.2. Concrete

cat.go

package concrete

type Cat struct {
}

func NewCat() *Cat {
	return &Cat{}
}

func (c *Cat) GetSound() string {
	return "meow meow"
}

dog.go

package concrete

type Dog struct {
}

func NewDog() *Dog {
	return &Dog{}
}

func (d *Dog) GetSound() string {
	return "gauw gauw"
}

rat.go

package concrete

type Rat struct {
}

func NewRat() *Rat {
	return &Rat{}
}

func (r *Rat) GetSound() string {
	return "chit chit"
}

3.3. Main Function

main.go

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"design-pattern-golang-example/factory_pattern/concrete"
	"design-pattern-golang-example/factory_pattern/constants"
	"design-pattern-golang-example/factory_pattern/factory"
)

func main() {
	// init
	cat := concrete.NewCat()
	dog := concrete.NewDog()
	rat := concrete.NewRat()
	animalFactory := &factory.AnimalFactory{
		Cat: cat,
		Dog: dog,
		Rat: rat,
	}

	// factory
	processor, err := animalFactory.GetAnimalFactory(constants.CAT)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
	sound := processor.GetSound()
	fmt.Println(sound)
}

The result: