I have been on a bit of a "quest" lately to learn interfaces better. While at work I hit up a couple of fellow developers on "why" you should use interfaces in the real world. Believe it or not after going through some code and getting some commentary on it I think I have an understanding of interfaces. Here is my understanding in a possible "real world" situation.
Let’s say you want to render out commonly used objects to the screen. They can be textbox's, images, or even labels. Each of these might have a common set of properties like title, id, width, and height; plus a method like Render() to show it on the screen. Now in .NET we might call these objects controls so we will use that naming convention for example sake. You might create an interface called IControl that all controls will inherit from. One reason to use an interface instead of a separate class is because the render method could be different for all the different controls, but is all that is needed to be called in order to show the control.
So, let’s look at some basic code. First we will look at the interface.
This interface IControl has our common properties and the render method. We are going to implement different render methods for each of our different controls so we might not necessarily want to create a control class to inherit from. To illustrate this more let’s look at two different controls implementing the IControl interface
TextBox
Label
If you notice both the TextBox and the Label controls have slightly different render methods, but both contain the same properties because of the IControl interface. This is important to note because we KNOW that if the IControl interface is being used that you can always call the methods and properties from them. So that means you can make a method like the following which will always call the render method as long as the object implements the IControl interface no matter what the control is.
With this you can create an instance of TextBox and Label and pass both of them to the above method and they will call the render method and output the correct information.
Here is some “example” code on how-to use and put together everything above.
Conclusion
To wrap it up you can make an interface and an interface basically says “hey I have at the very least these properties and methods and you can use them however you need without worrying about what they do to actually use them” Which means that you can write any code you want to implement each of the properties and methods and as long as you use the interface as your “datatype” there is no need to worry about what the code actually does for each and every object that implements the interface. In the case of the example there is no need to worry about how many or what the controls actually do when rendered because they will all be rendered by using the output method since the datatype of the parameter is IControl.
Please, feel free to leave comments and critiques on this. I am still learning about interfaces and this is as “real world” as I could figure out on how to use interfaces as that is what helps learn. Any help would be great and please feel free to download the code I have attached and play with it a bit. I am sorry for the length I just wanted to be thorough, I hope I was.
Interfaces.zip (6.33 kb)
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