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Message:

Is the model right or wrong?

Posted by Mike Mannion on 10 Nov 1998, 7:56 AM

It never does any harm to bare the following in mind: There is no such thing as a "correct" object model, only a a model which is more or less useful relative to a particular problem domain.
But just to add my two cents worth on this particular domain: A "useful" way to model an employee in many circumstances is as a Person which maintains an aggregate of PersonRoles.
A person's roles may include instances of EmployeeRole, ManagerRole, ExploitedLikeHellThenFiredRole. Some roles may, of course, be mutually exclusive, yet people can still serve multiple roles e.g. employee/manager.
The person class therefore possesses features which are truely fixed e.g. place of birth, birthday etc., plus the aggregate of dynamic roles.
As someone else wrote already, this basically follows a state or strategy pattern.
The book "Java Design 1st ed." (P.Coad, Printice Hall) decipts this using dandy little diagrams of hat-wearing people, where hats correspond to the roles the people play.
The same text also has a good summary of the inheritance vs composition argument. (2. edition apparantly comes out sometime soon.)