SOLID principles in .NET revisited part 6: the Interface Segregation Principle

Introduction

In the previous post we continued to discuss the Liskov Substitution Principle. We saw a subtle example of breaking LSP by trying to force an object to implement an interface even though not all methods of the interface made sense for it. The client object, i.e. OnDemandAgentService cannot consume all implementations of IAuthorizationService without fully being able to carry out its tasks.

A possible solution comes in the form of letter ‘I’ in SOLID, which stands for the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP). ISP states that clients should not be forced to depend on interfaces and methods they do not use. Applying ISP correctly will result in a lot of small interfaces instead of handful of large ones with lots of methods. The more methods to an interface has the more likely it is that an implementation will not be able to fulfil all parts of the contract. The IAuthorizationService only has 2 methods and we immediately found an example where a class, the AuthorizationService only could implement one of them.

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