Software design principles: DRY

Today we'll be exploring a design principle called DRY it stands for Don't Repeat Yourself. Of course, a pretty obvious one, meaning you shouldn't type code more than once.

The principle states: "Every piece of logic must have a single unambiguous representation within a system".

Of course, with the upcoming of component-based frameworks, we see less and less of reused codes.

DRY Examples permalink

I'm going to demonstrate some simple use-cases, but they should give you a good understanding of what DRY means.

const foods = ['🧀','🌶','🍉'];
const animals = ['🦞','🐁','🐕'];

revFoods = foods.reverse();
revAnimals = animals.reverse();

This is only a very simple function, but this can be converted to a DRY part:

const foods = ['🧀','🌶','🍉'];
const animals = ['🦞','🐁','🐕'];

let reverse = (input) => {
  return input.reverse();
}

revFoods = reverse(foods);
revAnimals = reverse(animals);

Why would you do this? Well, think of this code as a little bit more complicated, a full sorting function, and all of a sudden the sorting key changes, you now have to make changes twice, instead of doing it once.

Another good example is validations; this is were I personally fail sometimes.

<?php
class Validator {
	public function validate(array $post)
	{
		if(!isset($post['title']) {
			throw new \Exception('validation failed, no title set');
		}
		if(!isset($post['date']) {
			throw new \Exception('validation failed, no date set');
		}
		if(!isset($post['description']) {
			throw new \Exception('validation failed, no description set');
		}
	}
}

While it's not specifically a violation, we could enhance this and make our lives easier in case that exception might ever change.

<?php
class Validator {

	private $validateAttributes = [
		'title', 
		'date', 
		'description'
	];

	public function validate(array $post)
	{
		foreach ($this->validateAttributes as $attribute) {
        if (!isset($post[$attribute])) {
            throw new \Exception('validation failed, no '.$attribute.' set');
        }
    }
	}
}

There you go. I hope you learned something about not repeating yourself in code.

Looking forward to hearing what kind of things you do that you could optimize?

Thank you for reading, and let's connect! permalink

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