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Several times, I've found myself in a situation where I want to add functionality to an existing Observer-Observable relationship.

For example, let's say I have an Observable class called PriceFeed, instances of which are created by a variety of PriceSources. Observers on this are notified whenever the underlying PriceSource updates the PriceFeed with a new price.

Now I want to add a feature that allows a (temporary) override to be set on the PriceFeed. The PriceSource should still update prices on the PriceFeed, but for as long as the override is set, whenever a consumer asks PriceFeed for it's current value, it should get the override.

The way I did this was to introduce a new OverrideablePriceFeed that is itself both an Observer and an Observable, and that decorates the actual PriceFeed. It's implementation of .getPrice() is straight from Chain of Responsibility, but how about the handling of Observable events? When an override is set or cleared, it should issue it's own event to Observers, as well as forwarding events from the underlying PriceFeed.

I think of this as some kind of a chained observer, and was curious if there's a more definitive description of a similar pattern.

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  • Chain-of-responsibility "pattern consisting of a source of command objects and a series of processing objects. Each processing object contains logic that defines the types of command objects that it can handle; the rest are passed to the next processing object in the chain. A mechanism also exists for adding new processing objects to the end of this chain.In a variation of the standard chain-of-responsibility model, some handlers may act as dispatchers, capable of sending commands out in a variety of directions..."
    – gnat
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:32
  • Yeah, I know CoR. It does a good job of describing the 'getPrice' handling, but I don't think of it as handling the event forwarding piece of the puzzle. I'll update my question.
    – sharakan
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:36
  • "...In a variation of the standard chain-of-responsibility model, some handlers may act as dispatchers, capable of sending commands out in a variety of directions, forming a tree of responsibility..."
    – gnat
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:39
  • 2
    Decorating observers is just decorating observers. Many of the patterns combine to yield more powerful constructs.
    – Telastyn
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:42
  • @gnat yeah, but I read that as simply a CoR implementation that, instead of having a single next link to delegate to, has N. No?
    – sharakan
    Dec 6, 2012 at 15:50

2 Answers 2

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That's called Reactive Programming.

Look at Rx.

Rx is all about this.

It treats observables as enumerables and then what you are doing becomes as simple as calling map on the first sequence of events.

 events.map(new function(each) { return override != null ? override : each }

Rx is available for many languages, you'll find a video with an introduction of RxJS for Javascript here, http://youtu.be/FqBq4uoiG0M

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Sounds like what you're looking for is an interceptor. You can have your PriceFeed pass its list of observers to a new PriceFeedInterceptor that watches the PriceFeed and passes on either the regular or overridden price as appropriate. Your observers shouldn't need to be changed, but the PriceFeed will have to know about the interceptor and be prepared to delegate to it.

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