Kata: Gilded Rose in Clojure (II) -> Replacing conditional with polymorphism using multimethods

At the end of the previous post (Clarifying conditional logic), I had this version of the code:

Even though the conditional logic in the update-item-quality function read much better than the original one, I completely got rid of it using the replace conditional with polymorphism refactoring. I used multimethods which is one of the ways of achieving polymorphism in Clojure.

To start this refactoring, I first renamed the update-item-quality function to update-item-quality-old. Then I created a multimethod called update-item-quality with :name as dispatch function and with a method associated to its default dispatch that called the update-item-quality-old function:

This new version behaved exactly like the previous one and it was a good base to do the refactoring in small steps (one branch at a time) because every dispatch value not associated yet with a function was calling the old code thanks to the default dispatch.

Next I wrote a defmethod associated to the Age Brie item, copied the code from the Age Brie branch in update-item-quality-old into it and deleted the branch and the aged-brie? query helper. After this change all the tests were still passing.

Then I continued eliminating the rest of the branches in the cond of the update-item-quality-old function and their associated query functions.

Once I finished wit all the branches, I had replaced the conditional with polymorphism and could safely delete update-item-quality-old. I also changed the method associated with the default dispatch to make it just returned the received item (this was what got executed for the Sulfuras item and it corresponded to the :else branch of the cond in the old code).

To finish the refactoring I extracted the update-regular-item-quality helper to remove some duplication in some defmethods and moved the code that updated the quality into a separate name space, gilded-rose.item-quality:

You can follow the whole process I've just described having a look at the commits I did after every small refactoring (look at commits between Introduced a multimethod which now it's defaulting to the old update item quality function and Added helper to make all items age one day)

After this refactoring I had a nice polymorphic solution that made it easier to add the new conjured items functionality.

The next and last post will show how I modified the multimethod dispatch function to decorate the update quality behavior when it was updating a conjured item.

This is the second post in a series of posts about the Gilded Rose kata in Clojure:

1. Clarifying conditional logic
2. Replacing conditional with polymorphism using multimethods
3. Updating conjured items by decoration