Object-Oriented Design Pattern Implementation

Let’s look at an example of the state design pattern and how to use it in Rust. The state pattern is when a value has some internal state, and the value’s behavior changes based on the internal state. The internal state is represented by a set of objects that inherit shared functionality (we’ll use structs and traits since Rust doesn’t have objects and inheritance). Each state object is responsible for its own behavior and the rules for when it should change into another state. The value that holds one of these state objects doesn’t know anything about the different behavior of the states or when to transition between states. In the future when requirements change, we won’t need to change the code of the value holding the state or the code that uses the value. We’ll only need to update the code inside one of the state objects to change its rules, or perhaps add more state objects.

In order to explore this idea, we’re going to implement a blog post workflow in an incremental way. The workflow that we want our blog posts to follow, once we’re done with the implementation, is:

  1. A blog post starts as an empty draft.
  2. Once the draft is done, we request a review of the post.
  3. Once the post is approved, it gets published.
  4. Only published blog posts return content to print so that we can’t accidentally print the text of a post that hasn’t been approved.

Any other changes attempted on a post should have no effect. For example, if we try to approve a draft blog post before we’ve requested a review, the post should stay an unpublished draft.

Listing 17-11 shows this workflow in code form. This is an example usage of the API we’re going to implement in a library crate named blog:

Filename: src/main.rs

extern crate blog;
use blog::Post;

fn main() {
    let mut post = Post::new();

    post.add_text("I ate a salad for lunch today");
    assert_eq!("", post.content());

    post.request_review();
    assert_eq!("", post.content());

    post.approve();
    assert_eq!("I ate a salad for lunch today", post.content());
}

Listing 17-11: Code that demonstrates the desired behavior we want our blog crate to have

We want to be able to create a new draft blog post with Post::new. Then, we want to add some text to the blog post while we’re in the draft state. If we try to print out the post’s content immediately, though, we shouldn’t get any text, since the post is still a draft. We’ve added an assert_eq! here for demonstration purposes. Asserting that a draft blog post returns an empty string from the content method would make an excellent unit test in our library, but we’re not going to write tests for this example.

Next, we want to be able to request a review of our post, and content should still return an empty string while waiting for a review. Lastly, when we approve the blog post, it should get published, which means the text we added will be returned when we call content.

Notice that the only type we’re interacting with from the crate is the Post type. The various states a post can be in (draft, waiting for review, published) are managed internally to the Post type. The states change due to the methods we call on the Post instance, but we don’t have to manage the state changes directly. This also means we won’t make a mistake with the states, like forgetting to request a review before publishing.

Defining Post and Creating a New Instance in the Draft State

Let’s get started on the implementation of the library! We know we want to have a public Post struct that holds some content, so let’s start with the definition of the struct and an associated public new function to create an instance of Post as shown in Listing 17-12. We’re also going to have a private trait State. Post will hold a trait object of Box<State> inside an Option in a private field named state. We’ll see why the Option is necessary in a bit. The State trait defines all the behavior different post states share, and the Draft, PendingReview, and Published states will all implement the State trait. For now, the trait does not have any methods, and we’re going to start by defining just the Draft state since that’s the state we want to start in:

Filename: src/lib.rs

pub struct Post {
    state: Option<Box<State>>,
    content: String,
}

impl Post {
    pub fn new() -> Post {
        Post {
            state: Some(Box::new(Draft {})),
            content: String::new(),
        }
    }
}

trait State {}

struct Draft {}

impl State for Draft {}

Listing 17-12: Definition of a Post struct and a new function that creates a new Post instance, a State trait, and a Draft struct that implements State

When we create a new Post, we set its state field to a Some value holding a Box pointing to a new instance of the Draft struct. This ensures whenever we create a new instance of Post, it’ll start out as a draft. Because the state field of Post is private, there’s no way to create a Post in any other state!

Storing the Text of the Post Content

In the Post::new function, we set the content field to a new, empty String. In Listing 17-11, we showed that we want to be able to call a method named add_text and pass a &str to it to add that text to the content of the blog post. We’re choosing to implement this as a method rather than exposing the content field as pub because we want to be able to control how the content field’s data is read by implementing a method later. The add_text method is pretty straightforward though, let’s add the implementation in Listing 17-13 to the impl Post block:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl Post {
    // ...snip...
    pub fn add_text(&mut self, text: &str) {
        self.content.push_str(text);
    }
}

Listing 17-13: Implementing the add_text method to add text to a post’s content

add_text takes a mutable reference to self, since we’re changing the Post instance that we’re calling add_text on. We then call push_str on the String in content and pass the text argument to add to the saved content. This isn’t part of the state pattern since its behavior doesn’t depend on the state that the post is in. The add_text method doesn’t interact with the state field at all, but it is part of the behavior we want to support.

Content of a Draft Post is Empty

After we’ve called add_text and added some content to our post, we still want the content method to return an empty string slice since the post is still in the draft state, as shown on line 8 of Listing 17-11. For now, let’s implement the content method with the simplest thing that will fulfill this requirement: always returning an empty string slice. We’re going to change this later once we implement the ability to change a post’s state to be published. With what we have so far, though, posts can only be in the draft state, which means the post content should always be empty. Listing 17-14 shows this placeholder implementation:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl Post {
    // ...snip...
    pub fn content(&self) -> &str {
        ""
    }
}

Listing 17-14: Adding a placeholder implementation for the content method on Post that always returns an empty string slice

With this added content method, everything in Listing 17-11 up to line 8 works as we intend.

Requesting a Review of the Post Changes its State

Next up is requesting a review of a post, which should change its state from Draft to PendingReview. We want Post to have a public method named request_review that will take a mutable reference to self. Then we’re going to call an internal request_review method on the state that we’re holding, and this second request_review method will consume the current state and return a new state. In order to be able to consume the old state, the second request_review method needs to take ownership of the state value. This is where the Option comes in: we’re going to take the Some value out of the state field and leave a None in its place since Rust doesn’t let us have unpopulated fields in structs. Then we’ll set the post’s state value to the result of this operation. Listing 17-15 shows this code:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     state: Option<Box<State>>,
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl Post {
    // ...snip...
    pub fn request_review(&mut self) {
        if let Some(s) = self.state.take() {
            self.state = Some(s.request_review())
        }
    }
}

trait State {
    fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State>;
}

struct Draft {}

impl State for Draft {
    fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        Box::new(PendingReview {})
    }
}

struct PendingReview {}

impl State for PendingReview {
    fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        self
    }
}

Listing 17-15: Implementing request_review methods on Post and the State trait

We’ve added the request_review method to the State trait; all types that implement the trait will now need to implement the request_review method. Note that rather than having self, &self, or &mut self as the first parameter of the method, we have self: Box<Self>. This syntax means the method is only valid when called on a Box holding the type. This syntax takes ownership of Box<Self>, which is what we want because we’re transforming the old state into a new state, and we want the old state to no longer be valid.

The implementation for the request_review method on Draft is to return a new, boxed instance of the PendingReview struct, which is a new type we’ve introduced that represents the state when a post is waiting for a review. The PendingReview struct also implements the request_review method, but it doesn’t do any transformations. It returns itself since requesting a review on a post that’s already in the PendingReview state should stay in the PendingReview state.

Now we can start seeing the advantages of the state pattern: the request_review method on Post is the same no matter what its state value is. Each state is responsible for its own rules.

We’re going to leave the content method on Post as it is, returning an empty string slice. We can now have a Post in the PendingReview state, not just the Draft state, but we want the same behavior in the PendingReview state. Listing 17-11 now works up until line 11!

Approving a Post Changes the Behavior of content

The approve method on Post will be similar to that of the request_review method: it will set the state to the value that the current state says it should have when that state is approved. We’ll need to add the approve method to the State trait, and we’ll add a new struct that implements State, the Published state. Listing 17-16 shows the new code:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     state: Option<Box<State>>,
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl Post {
    // ...snip...
    pub fn approve(&mut self) {
        if let Some(s) = self.state.take() {
            self.state = Some(s.approve())
        }
    }
}

trait State {
    fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State>;
    fn approve(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State>;
}

struct Draft {}

impl State for Draft {
#     fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
#         Box::new(PendingReview {})
#     }
#
    // ...snip...
    fn approve(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        self
    }
}

struct PendingReview {}

impl State for PendingReview {
#     fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
#         self
#     }
#
    // ...snip...
    fn approve(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        Box::new(Published {})
    }
}

struct Published {}

impl State for Published {
    fn request_review(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        self
    }

    fn approve(self: Box<Self>) -> Box<State> {
        self
    }
}

Listing 17-16: Implementing the approve method on Post and the State trait

Similarly to request_review, if we call the approve method on a Draft, it will have no effect since it will return self. When we call approve on PendingReview, it returns a new, boxed instance of the Published struct. The Published struct implements the State trait, and for both the request_review method and the approve method, it returns itself since the post should stay in the Published state in those cases.

Now for updating the content method on Post: we want to return the value in the post’s content field if its state is Published, otherwise we want to return an empty string slice. Because the goal is to keep all the rules like this in the structs that implement State, we’re going to call a content method on the value in state and pass the post instance (that is, self) as an argument. Then we’ll return the value returned from the content method on the state value as shown in Listing 17-17:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# trait State {
#     fn content<'a>(&self, post: &'a Post) -> &'a str;
# }
# pub struct Post {
#     state: Option<Box<State>>,
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl Post {
    // ...snip...
    pub fn content(&self) -> &str {
        self.state.as_ref().unwrap().content(&self)
    }
    // ...snip...
}

Listing 17-17: Updating the content method on Post to delegate to a content method on State

We’re calling the as_ref method on the Option because we want a reference to the value inside the Option. We’re then calling the unwrap method, which we know will never panic because all the methods on Post ensure that the state value will have a Some value in it when those methods are done. This is one of the cases we talked about in Chapter 12 where we know that a None value is never possible even though the compiler isn’t able to understand that.

The content method on the State trait is where the logic for what content to return will be. We’re going to add a default implementation for the content method that returns an empty string slice. That lets us not need to implement content on the Draft and PendingReview structs. The Published struct will override the content method and will return the value in post.content, as shown in Listing 17-18:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     content: String
# }
trait State {
    // ...snip...
    fn content<'a>(&self, post: &'a Post) -> &'a str {
        ""
    }
}

// ...snip...
struct Published {}

impl State for Published {
    // ...snip...
    fn content<'a>(&self, post: &'a Post) -> &'a str {
        &post.content
    }
}

Listing 17-18: Adding the content method to the State trait

Note that we need lifetime annotations on this method, like we discussed in Chapter 10. We’re taking a reference to a post as an argument, and we’re returning a reference to a part of that post, so the lifetime of the returned reference is related to the lifetime of the post argument.

Tradeoffs of the State Pattern

We’ve shown that Rust is capable of implementing the object-oriented state pattern in order to encapsulate the different kinds of behavior that a post should have that depends on the state that the post is in. The methods on Post don’t know anything about the different kinds of behavior. The way this code is organized, we have one place to look in order to find out all the different ways that a published post behaves: the implementation of the State trait on the Published struct.

An alternative implementation that didn’t use the state pattern might have match statements in the methods on Post or even in the code that uses Post (main in our case) that checks what the state of the post is and changes behavior in those places instead. That would mean we’d have a lot of places to look in order to understand all the implications of a post being in the published state! This would get worse the more states we added: each of those match statements would need another arm. With the state pattern, the Post methods and the places we use Post don’t need match statements and adding a new state only involves adding a new struct and implementing the trait methods on that one struct.

This implementation is easy to extend to add more functionality. Here are some changes you can try making to the code in this section to see for yourself what it’s like to maintain code using this pattern over time:

  • Only allow adding text content when a post is in the Draft state
  • Add a reject method that changes the post’s state from PendingReview back to Draft
  • Require two calls to approve before changing the state to Published

A downside of the state pattern is that since the states implement the transitions between the states, some of the states are coupled to each other. If we add another state between PendingReview and Published, such as Scheduled, we would have to change the code in PendingReview to transition to Scheduled instead. It would be nicer if PendingReview wouldn’t need to change because of the addition of a new state, but that would mean switching to another design pattern.

There are a few bits of duplicated logic that are a downside of this implementation in Rust. It would be nice if we could make default implementations for the request_review and approve methods on the State trait that return self, but this would violate object safety since the trait doesn’t know what the concrete self will be exactly. We want to be able to use State as a trait object, so we need its methods to be object safe.

The other duplication that would be nice to get rid of is the similar implementations of the request_review and approve methods on Post. They both delegate to the implementation of the same method on the value in the Option in the state field, and set the new value of the state field to the result. If we had a lot of methods on Post that followed this pattern, we might consider defining a macro to eliminate the repetition (see Appendix E on macros).

A downside of implementing this object-oriented pattern exactly as it’s defined for object-oriented languages is that we’re not taking advantage of Rust’s strengths as much as we could be. Let’s take a look at some changes we can make to this code that can make invalid states and transitions into compile time errors.

Encoding States and Behavior as Types

We’re going to show how to rethink the state pattern a bit in order to get a different set of tradeoffs. Rather than encapsulating the states and transitions completely so that outside code has no knowledge of them, we’re going to encode the states into different types. When the states are types, Rust’s type checking will make any attempt to use a draft post where we should only use published posts into a compiler error.

Let’s consider the first part of main from Listing 17-11:

Filename: src/main.rs

fn main() {
    let mut post = Post::new();

    post.add_text("I ate a salad for lunch today");
    assert_eq!("", post.content());
}

We still want to create a new post in the draft state using Post::new, and we still want to be able to add text to the post’s content. But instead of having a content method on a draft post that returns an empty string, we’re going to make it so that draft posts don’t have the content method at all. That way, if we try to get a draft post’s content, we’ll get a compiler error that the method doesn’t exist. This will make it impossible for us to accidentally display draft post content in production, since that code won’t even compile. Listing 17-19 shows the definition of a Post struct, a DraftPost struct, and methods on each:

Filename: src/lib.rs

pub struct Post {
    content: String,
}

pub struct DraftPost {
    content: String,
}

impl Post {
    pub fn new() -> DraftPost {
        DraftPost {
            content: String::new(),
        }
    }

    pub fn content(&self) -> &str {
       &self.content
    }
}

impl DraftPost {
    pub fn add_text(&mut self, text: &str) {
        self.content.push_str(text);
    }
}

Listing 17-19: A Post with a content method and a DraftPost without a content method

Both the Post and DraftPost structs have a private content field that stores the blog post text. The structs no longer have the state field since we’re moving the encoding of the state to the types of the structs. Post will represent a published post, and it has a content method that returns the content.

We still have a Post::new function, but instead of returning an instance of Post, it returns an instance of DraftPost. It’s not possible to create an instance of Post right now since content is private and there aren’t any functions that return Post. DraftPost has an add_text method defined on it so that we can add text to content as before, but note that DraftPost does not have a content method defined! So we’ve enforced that all posts start as draft posts, and draft posts don’t have their content available for display. Any attempt to get around these constraints will be a compiler error.

Implementing Transitions as Transformations into Different Types

So how do we get a published post then? The rule we want to enforce is that a draft post has to be reviewed and approved before it can be published. A post in the pending review state should still not display any content. Let’s implement these constraints by adding another struct, PendingReviewPost, defining the request_review method on DraftPost to return a PendingReviewPost, and defining an approve method on PendingReviewPost to return a Post as shown in Listing 17-20:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct Post {
#     content: String,
# }
#
# pub struct DraftPost {
#     content: String,
# }
#
impl DraftPost {
    // ...snip...

    pub fn request_review(self) -> PendingReviewPost {
        PendingReviewPost {
            content: self.content,
        }
    }
}

pub struct PendingReviewPost {
    content: String,
}

impl PendingReviewPost {
    pub fn approve(self) -> Post {
        Post {
            content: self.content,
        }
    }
}

Listing 17-20: A PendingReviewPost that gets created by calling request_review on DraftPost, and an approve method that turns a PendingReviewPost into a published Post

The request_review and approve methods take ownership of self, thus consuming the DraftPost and PendingReviewPost instances and transforming them into a PendingReviewPost and a published Post, respectively. This way, we won’t have any DraftPost instances lingering around after we’ve called request_review on them, and so forth. PendingReviewPost doesn’t have a content method defined on it, so attempting to read its content is a compiler error like it is with DraftPost. Because the only way to get a published Post instance that does have a content method defined is to call the approve method on a PendingReviewPost, and the only way to get a PendingReviewPost is to call the request_review method on a DraftPost, we’ve now encoded the blog post workflow into the type system.

This does mean we have to make some small changes to main. Because request_review and approve return new instances rather than modifying the struct they’re called on, we need to add more let post = shadowing assignments to save the returned instances. We also can’t have the assertions about the draft and pending review post’s contents being empty string anymore, nor do we need them: we can’t compile code that tries to use the content of posts in those states any longer. The updated code in main is shown in Listing 17-21:

Filename: src/main.rs

extern crate blog;
use blog::Post;

fn main() {
    let mut post = Post::new();

    post.add_text("I ate a salad for lunch today");

    let post = post.request_review();

    let post = post.approve();

    assert_eq!("I ate a salad for lunch today", post.content());
}

Listing 17-21: Modifications to main to use the new implementation of the blog post workflow

Having to change main to reassign post is what makes this implementation not quite following the object-oriented state pattern anymore: the transformations between the states are no longer encapsulated entirely within the Post implementation. However, we’ve gained the property of having invalid states be impossible because of the type system and type checking that happens at compile time! This ensures that certain bugs, such as displaying the content of an unpublished post, will be discovered before they make it to production.

Try the tasks suggested that add additional requirements that we mentioned at the start of this section to see how working with this version of the code feels.

Even though Rust is capable of implementing object-oriented design patterns, there are other patterns like encoding state into the type system that are available in Rust. These patterns have different tradeoffs than the object-oriented patterns do. While you may be very familiar with object-oriented patterns, rethinking the problem in order to take advantage of Rust’s features can give benefits like preventing some bugs at compile-time. Object-oriented patterns won’t always be the best solution in Rust, since Rust has features like ownership that object-oriented languages don’t have.

Summary

No matter whether you think Rust is an object-oriented language or not after reading this chapter, you’ve now seen that trait objects are a way to get some object-oriented features in Rust. Dynamic dispatch can give your code some flexibility in exchange for a bit of runtime performance. This flexibility can be used to implement object-oriented patterns that can help with the maintainability of your code. Rust also has different features, like ownership, than object-oriented languages. An object-oriented pattern won’t always be the best way to take advantage of Rust’s strengths.

Next, let’s look at another feature of Rust that enables lots of flexibility: patterns. We’ve looked at them briefly throughout the book, but haven’t seen everything they’re capable of yet. Let’s go!

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