Step 0: Introduction

Common problem faced by many developers is: "how to parameterize?". Actually, it's really good if developers are aware of this problem and have some idea of how complex and crucial part of application this is. Most often people struggle with maintaining custom implementations, which tend to produce a lot hard to test code.

This tutorial will guide you through building an application based on SmartParam, which has to follow some business requirements.

Problem domain

Problem domain is close to a lot of insurance and e-commerce companies - discounting. How to build a dynamic, elastic discounting system? For use of this tutorial, following business requirements have been defined:

• 2 discounts - loyalty discount and targeted, dynamic per-user discount
• 2 different policies of joining discounts - choosing higher and summing them
• policy should be chosen based on date and user

Base implementation

Tutorial application is based on Spring configured via Java config. It is used only for dependency injection, so no working knowledge is required to go through the tutorial (as long as you are familiar with conception of dependency injection and inversion of control).

Central place of our application is User:

public class User {

    private final UserLogin login;

    private final LocalDate registrationDate;

    private final UserAccountType accountType;

    /*...*/
}

UserAccountType is crucial for parametrization (different users have different discounts):

public enum UserAccountType {

    REGULAR, PREMIUM;

}

Class responsible for calculating discounts is DiscountCalculator:

public class DiscountCalculator {

    public Discount calculateForUser(User user) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Please implement me using SmartParam!");
    }

}

This is the place where all the magic will take place. We also defined interface for discount combination policy which shall have two implementations later on:

public interface MultiDiscountPolicy {

    Discount combine(Discount discountA, Discount discountB);

}

Code samples

All code can be found in branch step-0-introduction of tutorial project.