Visitor pattern


A visitor pattern is a software design pattern that separates the algorithm from the object structure. Because of this separation, new operations can be added to existing object structures without modifying the structures. It is one way to follow the open/closed principle in object-oriented programming and software engineering.
In essence, the visitor allows adding new virtual functions to a family of classes, without modifying the classes. Instead, a visitor class is created that implements all of the appropriate specializations of the virtual function. The visitor takes the instance reference as input, and implements the goal through double dispatch.
Programming languages with sum types and pattern matching obviate many of the benefits of the visitor pattern, as the visitor class is able to both easily branch on the type of the object and generate a compiler error if a new object type is defined which the visitor does not yet handle.

Overview

The Visitor
design pattern is one of the twenty-three Gang of Four design patterns.

Problems, the Visitor design pattern can solve

  • It should be possible to define a new operation for classes of an object structure without changing the classes.
When new operations are needed frequently and the object structure consists of many unrelated classes,
it's inflexible to add new subclasses each time a new operation is required
because " distributing all these operations across the various node classes leads to a system that's hard to understand, maintain, and change."

Solution, the Visitor design pattern describes

  • Define a separate object that implements an operation to be performed on elements of an object structure.
  • Clients traverse the object structure and call a dispatching operation accept on an element — that "dispatches" the request to the "accepted visitor object". The visitor object then performs the operation on the element.

This makes it possible to create new operations independently from the classes of an object structure
by adding new visitor objects.
See also the UML class and sequence diagram below.

Definition

The Gang of Four defines the Visitor as:
The nature of the Visitor makes it an ideal pattern to plug into public APIs, thus allowing its clients to perform operations on a class using a "visiting" class without having to modify the source.

Advantages

Moving operations into visitor classes is beneficial when
  • many unrelated operations on an object structure are required,
  • the classes that make up the object structure are known and not expected to change,
  • new operations need to be added frequently,
  • an algorithm involves several classes of the object structure, but it is desired to manage it in one single location,
  • an algorithm needs to work across several independent class hierarchies.
A drawback to this pattern, however, is that it makes extensions to the class hierarchy more difficult, as new classes typically require a new visit method to be added to each visitor.

Application

Consider the design of a 2D computer-aided design system. At its core, there are several types to represent basic geometric shapes like circles, lines, and arcs. The entities are ordered into layers, and at the top of the type hierarchy is the drawing, which is simply a list of layers, plus some added properties.
A fundamental operation on this type hierarchy is saving a drawing to the system's native file format. At first glance, it may seem acceptable to add local save methods to all types in the hierarchy. But it is also useful to be able to save drawings to other file formats. Adding ever more methods for saving into many different file formats soon clutters the relatively pure original geometric data structure.
A naive way to solve this would be to maintain separate functions for each file format. Such a save function would take a drawing as input, traverse it, and encode into that specific file format. As this is done for each added different format, duplication between the functions accumulates. For example, saving a circle shape in a raster format requires very similar code no matter what specific raster form is used, and is different from other primitive shapes. The case for other primitive shapes like lines and polygons is similar. Thus, the code becomes a large outer loop traversing through the objects, with a large decision tree inside the loop querying the type of the object. Another problem with this approach is that it is very easy to miss a shape in one or more savers, or a new primitive shape is introduced, but the save routine is implemented only for one file type and not others, leading to code extension and maintenance problems. As the versions of the same file grows it becomes more complicated to maintain it.
Instead, the visitor pattern can be applied. It encodes the logical operation on the whole hierarchy into one class that implements the common methods for traversing the tree and describes virtual helper methods to be implemented for format specific behaviors. In the case of the CAD example, such format specific behaviors would be implemented by a subclass of Visitor. As such, all duplication of type checks and traversal steps is removed. Additionally, the compiler now complains if a shape is omitted since it is now expected by the common base traversal/save function.

Iteration loops

The visitor pattern may be used for iteration over container-like data structures just like Iterator pattern but with limited functionality. For example, iteration over a directory structure could be implemented by a function class instead of more conventional loop pattern. This would allow deriving various useful information from directories content by implementing a visitor functionality for every item while reusing the iteration code. It's widely employed in Smalltalk systems and can be found in C++ as well. A drawback of this approach, however, is that you can't break out of the loop easily or iterate concurrently. The latter would require writing additional functionality for a visitor to support these features.

Structure

UML class and sequence diagram

In the UML class diagram above, the ElementA class doesn't implement a new operation directly.
Instead, ElementA implements a dispatching operation accept that "dispatches" a request to the "accepted visitor object". The Visitor1 class implements the operation.
ElementB then implements accept by dispatching to visitor.visitElementB. The Visitor1 class implements the operation.
The UML sequence diagram
shows the run-time interactions: The Client object traverses the elements of an object structure and calls accept on each element.
First, the Client calls accept on
ElementA, which calls visitElementA on the accepted visitor object.
The element itself is passed to the visitor so that
it can "visit" ElementA.
Thereafter, the Client calls accept on
ElementB, which calls visitElementB on the visitor that "visits" ElementB.

Details

The visitor pattern requires a programming language that supports single dispatch, as common object-oriented languages do. Under this condition, consider two objects, each of some class type; one is termed the element, and the other is visitor.

Objects

Visitor

The visitor declares a visit method, which takes the element as an argument, for each class of element. Concrete visitors are derived from the visitor class and implement these visit methods, each of which implements part of the algorithm operating on the object structure. The state of the algorithm is maintained locally by the concrete visitor class.

Element

The element declares an accept method to accept a visitor, taking the visitor as an argument. Concrete elements, derived from the element class, implement the accept method. In its simplest form, this is no more than a call to the visitor's visit method. Composite elements, which maintain a list of child objects, typically iterate over these, calling each child's accept method.

Client

The client creates the object structure, directly or indirectly, and instantiates the concrete visitors. When an operation is to be performed which is implemented using the Visitor pattern, it calls the accept method of the top-level element.

Methods

Accept

When the accept method is called in the program, its implementation is chosen based on both the dynamic type of the element and the static type of the visitor. When the associated visit method is called, its implementation is chosen based on both the dynamic type of the visitor and the static type of the element, as known from within the implementation of the accept method, which is the same as the dynamic type of the element.

Visit

Thus, the implementation of the visit method is chosen based on both the dynamic type of the element and the dynamic type of the visitor. This effectively implements double dispatch. For languages whose object systems support multiple dispatch, not only single dispatch, such as Common Lisp or C# via the Dynamic Language Runtime, implementation of the visitor pattern is greatly simplified by allowing use of simple function overloading to cover all the cases being visited. A dynamic visitor, provided it operates on public data only, conforms to the open/closed principle and to the single responsibility principle.
In this way, one algorithm can be written to traverse a graph of elements, and many different kinds of operations can be performed during that traversal by supplying different kinds of visitors to interact with the elements based on the dynamic types of both the elements and the visitors.

Examples

C#

This example declares a separate ExpressionPrintingVisitor class that takes care of the printing. If the introduction of a new concrete visitor is desired, a new class will be created to implement the Visitor interface, and new implementations for the Visit methods will be provided. The existing classes will remain unchanged.

namespace Wikipedia.Examples;
using System;
interface IVisitor
class ExpressionPrintingVisitor : IVisitor
abstract class Expression
class Literal : Expression
class Addition : Expression
public static class Program

Smalltalk

In this case, it is the object's responsibility to know how to print itself on a stream. The visitor here is then the object, not the stream.

"There's no syntax for creating a class. Classes are created by sending messages to other classes."
WriteStream subclass: #ExpressionPrinter
instanceVariableNames:
classVariableNames:
package: 'Wikipedia'.
ExpressionPrinter>>write: anObject
"Delegates the action to the object. The object doesn't need to be of any special
class; it only needs to be able to understand the message #putOn:"
anObject putOn: self.
^ anObject.
Object subclass: #Expression
instanceVariableNames:
classVariableNames:
package: 'Wikipedia'.
Expression subclass: #Literal
instanceVariableNames: 'value'
classVariableNames:
package: 'Wikipedia'.
Literal class>>with: aValue
"Class method for building an instance of the Literal class"
^ self new
value: aValue;
yourself.
Literal>>value: aValue
"Setter for value"
value := aValue.
Literal>>putOn: aStream
"A Literal object knows how to print itself"
aStream nextPutAll: value asString.
Expression subclass: #Addition
instanceVariableNames: 'left right'
classVariableNames:
package: 'Wikipedia'.
Addition class>>left: a right: b
"Class method for building an instance of the Addition class"
^ self new
left: a;
right: b;
yourself.
Addition>>left: anExpression
"Setter for left"
left := anExpression.
Addition>>right: anExpression
"Setter for right"
right := anExpression.
Addition>>putOn: aStream
"An Addition object knows how to print itself"
aStream nextPut: $.
Object subclass: #Program
instanceVariableNames:
classVariableNames:
package: 'Wikipedia'.
Program>>main
| expression stream |
expression := Addition
left:
right: )
right:.
stream := ExpressionPrinter on:.
stream write: expression.
Transcript show: stream contents.
Transcript flush.

Go

Go does not support method overloading, so the visit methods need different names. A typical visitor interface might be

type Visitor interface

Java

The following example is in the language Java, and shows how the contents of a tree of nodes can be printed. Instead of creating print methods for each node subclass, one visitor class performs the required printing action. Because different node subclasses require slightly different actions to print properly, CarElementPrintVisitor dispatches actions based on the class of the argument passed to its visit method. CarElementDoVisitor, which is analogous to a save operation for a different file format, does likewise.

Output


Visiting front left wheel
Visiting front right wheel
Visiting back left wheel
Visiting back right wheel
Visiting body
Visiting engine
Visiting car
Kicking my front left wheel
Kicking my front right wheel
Kicking my back left wheel
Kicking my back right wheel
Moving my body
Starting my engine
Starting my car

Common Lisp

Output

"front-left-wheel"
"front-right-wheel"
"rear-left-wheel"
"rear-right-wheel"
"body"
"engine"
kicking wheel "front-left-wheel" 42 times
kicking wheel "front-right-wheel" 42 times
kicking wheel "rear-left-wheel" 42 times
kicking wheel "rear-right-wheel" 42 times
don't know how "body" and 42 should interact
starting engine "engine" 42 times
kicking wheel "front-left-wheel" symbolically using symbol ABC
kicking wheel "front-right-wheel" symbolically using symbol ABC
kicking wheel "rear-left-wheel" symbolically using symbol ABC
kicking wheel "rear-right-wheel" symbolically using symbol ABC
don't know how "body" and ABC should interact
starting engine "engine" symbolically using symbol ABC

Python

Python does not support method overloading in the classical sense, so the "visit" methods for the different model types need to have different names.

Output


Visiting front left wheel.
Visiting front right wheel.
Visiting back left wheel.
Visiting back right wheel.
Visiting body.
Visiting engine.
Visiting car.
Kicking my front left wheel.
Kicking my front right wheel.
Kicking my back left wheel.
Kicking my back right wheel.
Moving my body.
Starting my engine.
Starting my car.

Abstraction

Using Python 3 or above allows to make a general implementation of the accept method:

class Visitable:
def accept -> Any:
lookup: str = f"visit_"
return getattr

One could extend this to iterate over the class's method resolution order if they would like to fall back on already-implemented classes. They could also use the subclass hook feature to define the lookup in advance.

Related design patterns

  • Iterator pattern – defines a traversal principle like the visitor pattern, without making a type differentiation within the traversed objects
  • Church encoding – a related concept from functional programming, in which tagged union/sum types may be modeled using the behaviors of "visitors" on such types, and which enables the visitor pattern to emulate variants and patterns.