design-patternsdecorator

When to Use the Decorator Pattern?

I am going over my design patterns, and one pattern I have yet to seriously use in my coding is the Decorator Pattern.

I understand the pattern, but what I would love to know are some good concrete examples of times in the real world that the decorator pattern is the best/optimal/elegant solution. Specific situations where the need for the decorator pattern is really handy.

Thanks.

Solution

  • The decorator pattern is used a lot with streams: you can wrap a stream with a stream to get added functionality. I've seen this with the .Net framework - as far as I know this occurs elsewhere. My favourite is using GZipStream around a FileStream, for added compression.