In this article, I’m going to touch a problem known by many names, one of which is the Law of Demeter. But honestly speaking, it is not even a law, but a guideline. The rules promoted by this principle are:

  1. Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units “closely” related to the current unit.
  2. Each unit should only talk to its friends; don’t talk to strangers.
  3. Only talk to your immediate friends.

These rules sound a bit confusing: units, friends, strangers. How to apply all of this to the codebase? What does each of these terms mean within our codebase?

So, the idea behind this principle means that, inside your application, the code that we write should express knowledge only of its surroundings. This guideline promotes the notion of loose coupling in your codebase, which leads to more maintainability. And now let’s change a bit the rules above and apply them to object-oriented programming. Imagine that we have a class which implements a given method. This method should only call the following objects:

  1. The object that owns this method.
  2. Objects passed as arguments to the method.
  3. Objects that are dependencies of the owner instance (are held in instance variables).
  4. Any object which is created locally in the method.
  5. Global objects that can be accessed by the owner instance within the method.

On the other side, if an object knows too much about another (knowledge how to access the third one) is considered as bad design, because the object has to unnecessary traverse from top to bottom of the chain to get actual dependencies it needs to work with.

Lets’ have a look at the common example:

<?php

class InvoiceController
{
    public function create()
    {
        // ... 
        try {
            $user->getAccount()
                ->getBalance()
                ->substractSum($invoiceTotal);
        } catch (NotEnoughFundsException $e) {
            // handle expcetion
        }
    }
}

It looks like we are passing the total sum of the invoice through to substractSum() method and catching the exception, if the user doesn’t have enough funds to pay the invoice.

To resume: we have an error handling here, and a lazy load in the background for UserAccount and UserBalance objects. This very small snippet of code looks fine today, but in the future, it can produce for us some potential problems.

One arrow principle

In original, it is The One Dot Principle, but in PHP we don’t have dots in method calls chains, we have arrows. If you find yourself using more that one arrow to access a property or method, the chances are high that you are not following The Principle of Least Knowledge. In our example we have this:

<?php

$user->getAccount()
    ->getBalance()
    ->substractSum($invoiceTotal);

Of course we can’t fix this issue by adhering to a single arrow, but on every new line like this:

<?php

$account = $user->getAccount();
$balance = $account->getBalance();
$balance->substractSum($invoiceTotal);

Nothing has changed here. The key problem still remains. We call getAccount() method, which returns an object, that has the getBalance() method. And then the getBalance() method offers the substractSum() method. There is too much knowledge here. In the terms of the Law of Demeter this code snippet reached through the intermediate objects to invoke the substractSum() method at the end of the chain. It is another way of tight coupling, which we should always be trying to avoid in our codebase. Tight coupling reduces the quality of our application code, making it harder to maintain. When we modify one piece of tightly coupled code, then when need to review and modify all the other members of the tightly coupled relationships.

In our example, in six months the business can ask us to add some credit facilities instead of pre-funding invoices. For business, it is a very small change for business, but a massive change for our codebase, thanks to our tightly coupled design.

If we had respected the Law of Demeter in our code, all of this extra work might have been avoided. Instead of a chain of method calls to trigger an invoice payment, our controller might have looked like this:

<?php

class InvoiceController 
{
    public function create()
    {
        // ...
        try {
            $user->payInvoice($invoice);
        } catch(InvoicePaymentException $e) {
            // handle exception
        }
    }
}

We have refactored the chain of method calls into a single line of code:

<?php

$user->payInvoice($invoice);

We’ve hidden all the knowledge, that the controller’s action method shouldn’t have had. The knowledge of the inner process of the invoice payment now is encapsulated in User class and has been removed from the place it doesn’t belong to. The controller shouldn’t know anything about the process of payment, it simply triggers the action. In our case, the only knowledge that it has is that an exception can be thrown.

<?php

class User
{
    public function payInvoice(Invoice $invoice)
    {
        try {
            $this->getAccount()->payInvoice($invoice);
        } catch (NotEnoughFundsException $e) {
            // throw new InvoicePaymentException();
        }
    }
}

In the code above there is a new payInvoice() method in the User class. It is a proxy method. It checks that it’s parameter is an instance of the Invoice class. Then it passes this instance to this user’s UserAccount instance.

Code smells

You can notice that this approach may lead to some code smells. For example, our User class can become a God object, with lots of proxy methods. You can also say, that we are violating the Single Responsibility Principle. Is it User responsibility to pay the invoice, if behind the scenes it proxies it to other objects? There are two ways to handle these issues. If you want to stay with syntaсtic sugar payInvoice method in the User class, you can extract the PaysInvoices trait and place all related to payment process methods there. With this approach, our User class is not overwhelmed with proxy methods, and they are all located in one place:

<?php

trait PaysInvoice 
{
    public function payInvoice(Invoice $invoice)
    {
        try {
            $this->getAccount()->payInvoice($invoice);
        } catch (NotEnoughFundsException $e) {
            // throw new InvoicePaymentException();
        }
    }
}


class User
{
    use PaysInvoice;

    // ...
}

Another way is to get the middle collaborator and work with it. In out example it is the UserAccount instance:

<?php

class InvoiceController
{
    public function create()
    {
        // ...
        try{
            $userAccount->payInvoice($invoice);
        } catch(InvoicePaymentException $e) {
            // handle exception
        }
    }
}

In this case, we hide the entire logic of the payment process behind payInvoice() method in the UserAccount class. Our controller again knows nothing how the invoice is being paid.

Summary

The Law of Demeter gives us a guideline how to achieve loose coupling in our code and helps to properly encapsulate the knowledge of some complicated operations or logic into the places where they should be. In our first example we had a controller action method that was reaching through the chain of objects to get at the substractAmount() method of the UserBalance class. Not it is clear why it is a bad design and what problems it can cause. The developer that works on the UserAccount or the UserBalance class may not know that the controller was accessing the $balance instance through User and UserAccount instances. When the process of the payment is encapsulated in one place the controller becomes ignorant to any changes being made to this process.