Constructor Injection and Null Object Design Patterns

The Constructor Injection design pattern is a pattern that helps you declare all the required dependencies of a class in it’s constructor.

This is useful because it helps you decouple the code, you can specify an interface instead of a concrete type, remember, program to an interface.

Also, in the constructor it is easier to guard against null objects. The calling code doesn’t have to worry about null exceptions every time it uses a dependency.

Avoid providing defaults when using this pattern, as this will couple the code with a concrete type. When a dependency is not needed, use the Null Object pattern.

We’re going to pickup from the last article and show you how you can modify the application to use the constructor injection and null object design patterns.

The class graph will look like this:

In order to demonstrate this pattern I will introduce a new class MessageTranslator.

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class MessageTranslator:
    def __init__(self, translator: Translator, printer: Printer):
        if not translator:
            raise ValueError("Translator cannot be None.")
        if not printer:
            raise ValueError("Printer cannot be None.")

        self._translator = translator
        self._printer = printer

    def translate(self, message):
        return self._translator.translate(message)

    def print(self, message):
        self._printer.print(message)

And modify the Application code to use it:

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class Application:
    def __init__(self):
        self._input_listener: InputListener = ConsoleInputListener("< ")

    def start(self):
        print("starting application.")
        message_translator = MessageTranslator(RomanianTranslator(), ConsolePrinter(">"))
        while True:
            user_in = Message(self._input_listener.get_input())
            if str(user_in) == "exit":
                exit(0)

            translated_message = message_translator.translate(user_in)
            message_translator.print(translated_message)

That’s it! You’ve used the constructor injection pattern.

Now, if don’t want to print the translated message into the console we can’t just pass a null Printer, that would raise an exception.

We need use the null object pattern to implement a Printer that does nothing.

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class VoidPrinter(Printer):
    def print(self, message):
        pass

If we modify the Application code to use our VoidPrinter, the output would be:

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starting application.
 < hello Dev
 < 

Thanks for reading! As always, the full code can be found on my Github.