The Chain of Responsibility pattern
The Chain of Responsibility pattern offers an elegant way to handle requests by passing them through a chain of handlers. Each handler in the chain has the autonomy to decide whether it can process the request or if it should delegate it further along the chain. This pattern shines when dealing with operations that involve multiple handlers but don’t necessarily require all of them to be involved.
In practice, this pattern encourages us to focus on objects and the flow of a request within an application. Notably, the client code remains blissfully unaware of the entire chain of handlers. Instead, it only interacts with the first processing element in the chain. Similarly, each processing element knows only about its immediate successor, forming a one-way relationship similar to a singly linked list. This structure is purposefully designed to achieve decoupling between the sender (client) and the receivers (processing elements).
