#821 – The Factory Pattern

Factory is a design pattern that you can use when you don’t want client code creating objects directly, but you want to centralize object creation within another class.  To get a new instance of an object, you call a method in the factory, which creates the object on your behalf.

In the example below, DogFactory.CreateDog is a factory method, which does the actual creation of a Dog object.

    public sealed class DogFactory
    {
        // Instance created when first referenced
        private static readonly DogFactory instance = new DogFactory();

        // Prevent early instantiation due to beforefieldinit flag
        static DogFactory() { }

        // Prevent instantiation
        private DogFactory() { }

        public static DogFactory Instance
        {
            get { return instance; }
        }

        // Factory pattern - method for creating a dog
        public Dog CreateDog(string name, int age)
        {
            return new Dog(name, age);
        }
    }

To create a Dog:

            Dog myDog = DogFactory.Instance.CreateDog("Kirby", 15);