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We have a new object in our project; let's see how to use it in our existing code!
Related Links
Things to Consider
- DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and other tips from The Pragmatic Programmer
-
SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Programming:
- S: Single Responsibility Principle
- O: Open/Closed Principle
- L: Liskov Substitution Principle
- I: Interface Segregation Principle
- D: Dependency Inversion Principle
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First, we need to instantiate
a fact book object.
0:00
We'll do it similarly to how we created a
new random object in the fact book class.
0:03
We'll use this new fact book object to
do the work of getting us a random fact
0:08
when the button is clicked.
0:12
We create it here in the on click method.
0:14
But if we do that,
0:17
a new fact book object would be created
every time we tap on the button.
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That doesn't seem very efficient.
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What if our object was huge,
with thousands of facts to choose from?
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On each tap,
0:28
we'd be wasting tons of processing
time just in recreating the fact book.
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Instead, let's create it
just once as a property.
0:34
Up here before the on create method but
after we define our class,
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let's add some space and
type private val, and name it factbook.
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And notice that we're using
the private keyword word.
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We only want this variable to
be available inside this class.
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No other code outside our
activity needs to know about it.
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Next we need to initialize our fact book.
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Type equals capital,
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capital F, A, and
then use autocomplete to finish it.
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And finally, add the parenthesis.
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This creates a new fact book object
using the default constructor.
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But wait, we didn't add a constructor
to our fact book class.
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And luckily, we don't need to.
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If we don't provide our own constructor,
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Catlin will automatically
create one behind the scenes.
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So even if we don't add
a constructor to a class,
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we can always create objects from that
class by using the default constructor.
1:34
Back in our own quick listener, let's get
a random fact from our fact book object
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and store it in a variable name fact.
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Type vowel, fact, and
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set it equal to fac, book, dot and cool.
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Our gift fact method is right
at the top of auto complete.
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But where did the rest of
these methods come from?
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The ones we didn't write?
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In Catlin, every class either directly or
indirectly extends from the any class.
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Even though we didn't use the extends
keyword when writing our factBook class,
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it still extends the any class by default.
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So these other methods
come from the any class.
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Let's hit Enter, and we're done.
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Now let's take a quick review of our code.
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We create our activity, and give it
the layout we'd like it to display.
2:23
Then we initialize our view
variables to the views in the layout
2:27
by using their IDs.
2:30
Then we set an on click listener for
our button, and when the button is tapped,
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we use our fact book object to get a
random fact and update the fact text view.
2:36
This looks pretty good, but let's take
one more pass at our fact book class.
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First we see one of the main
problems with using comments.
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We ideally want to write code that's easy
to understand without additional comments.
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Comments tend to be forgotten about
after they're first written and
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can end up in not making any sense.
2:57
Like this one, let's delete it.
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All right there's one more thing we should
change here, can you guess what it is?
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One of the properties of our fact
book is all the facts it contains, so
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this facts array should really be
a property of our fact book and
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not a local variable of
the get fact method.
3:17
Let's cut the facts declaration
from the get getFact method and
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then paste it up here under Properties.
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Awesome, now it's time to test the app.
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Remember, the goal of refactoring
is to make changes to the code
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without changing the behavior of the app.
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So it should work exactly
the same as before.
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Great work.
3:45
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