How to solve the violations of the Law of Demeter?

Question

A colleague and I designed a system for our customer, and in our opinion we created a nice clean design. But I'm having problems with some coupling we've introduced. I could try to create an example design which includes the same problems as our design, but if you forgive me I'll create an extract of our design to support the question.

We're developing a system for the registration of certain treatments for a patients. To avoid having a broken link to image I'll describe the conceptual UML class diagram as a c# style class definition.

class Discipline {}
class ProtocolKind 
{ 
   Discipline; 
}
class Protocol
{
   ProtocolKind;
   ProtocolMedication; //1..*
}
class ProtocolMedication
{
   Medicine;
}
class Medicine
{
   AdministrationRoute;
}
class AdministrationRoute {}

I'll try to explain a bit about the design, a protocol is the template for a new treatment. And a protocol is of a certain Kind and has medications which need to be administered. Per protocol the dosage can differ for the same medicine (amongst other things), so that's stored in the ProtocolMedication class. AdministrationRoute is the way the medicine is administered and iscreated/updated separately from the protocol management.

I've found the following places which we'll have a violation of the Law of Demeter:

Violations of the Law of Demeter

Inside of the BLL

For example, inside the business logic of the ProtocolMedication there are rules which depend on the AdministrationRoute.Soluble property of the medicine. The code would become

if (!Medicine.AdministrationRoute.Soluble)
{
   //validate constrains on fields
}

Inside the repositories

A method which would list all the protocols in a certain Discipline would be written as:

public IQueryable<Protocol> ListQueryable(Discipline discipline)
{
    return ListQueryable().Where(p => (p.Kind.Discipline.Id == discipline.Id)); // Entity Frameworks needs you to compare the Id...
}

Inside the User Interface

We use ASP.NET (no MVC) for the interface of our system, in my opinion this layer currently has the worst violations. The databinding of a gridview (a column which must display the Discipline of a protocol must bind to Kind.Discipline.Name), which are strings, so no compile time errors.

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Discipline" SortExpression="Kind.Discipline.Name">
   <ItemTemplate>
      <%# Eval("Kind.Discipline.Name")%>
   </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

So I think the actual question might be, when would it be okay to look at it more as the Suggestion of Demeter, and what can be done to solve the violations of the Law of Demeter?

I've got a few idea's of myself but I'll post them as answers so they can be commented and voted on seperatly. (I'm not sure this is the SO way to do it, if not, I'll delete my answers and add them to the question).

Answer 1

My understanding of consequences of the Law of Demeter seems to be different to DrJokepu's - whenever I've applied it to object oriented code it's resulted in tighter encapsulation and cohesion, rather than the addition of extra getters to contract paths in procedural code.

Wikipedia has the rule as

More formally, the Law of Demeter for functions requires that a method M of an object O may only invoke the methods of the following kinds of objects:

1. O itself
2. M's parameters
3. any objects created/instantiated within M
4. O's direct component objects

If you have a method which takes 'kitchen' as a parameter, Demeter says you cannot inspect the components of the kitchen, not that you can only inspect the immediate components.

Writing a bunch of functions just to satisfy the Law of Demeter like this

Kitchen.GetCeilingColour()

just looks like a total waste of time for me and actually gets is my way to get things done

If a method outside of Kitchen is passed a kitchen, by strict Demeter it can't call any methods on the result of GetCeilingColour() on it either.

But either way, the point is to remove the dependency on structure rather than moving the representation of the structure from a sequence of chained methods to the name of the method. Making methods such as MoveTheLeftHindLegForward() in a Dog class doesn't do anything towards fulfilling Demeter. Instead, call dog.walk() and let the dog handle its own legs.

For example, what if the requirements change and I will need the ceiling height too?

I'd refactor the code so that you are working with room and ceilings:

interface RoomVisitor {
  void visitFloor (Floor floor) ...
  void visitCeiling (Ceiling ceiling) ...
  void visitWall (Wall wall ...
}

interface Room { accept (RoomVisitor visitor) ; }

Kitchen.accept(RoomVisitor visitor) {
   visitor.visitCeiling(this.ceiling);
   ...
}

Or you can go further and eliminate getters totally by passing the parameters of the ceiling to the visitCeiling method, but that often introduces a brittle coupling.

Applying it to the medical example, I'd expect a SolubleAdminstrationRoute to be able to validate the medicine, or at least call the medicine's validateForSolubleAdministration method if there's information encapsulated in the medicine's class which is required for the validation.

However, Demeter applies to OO systems - where data is encapsulated within the objects which operate upon the data - rather than the system you're talking about, which has different layers an data being passed between the layers in dumb, navigatable structures. I don't see that Demeter can necessarily be applied to such systems as easily as to monolithic or message based ones. (In a message based system, you can't navigate to anything which isn't in the grams of the message, so you're stuck with Demeter whether you like it or not)