Decorator

Real world example

Imagine you run a car service shop offering multiple services. Now how do you calculate the bill to be charged? You pick one service and dynamically keep adding to it the prices for the provided services till you get the final cost. Here each type of service is a decorator.

In plain words

Decorator pattern lets you dynamically change the behavior of an object at run time by wrapping them in an object of a decorator class.

Wikipedia says

In object-oriented programming, the decorator pattern is a design pattern that allows behavior to be added to an individual object, either statically or dynamically, without affecting the behavior of other objects from the same class. The decorator pattern is often useful for adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, as it allows functionality to be divided between classes with unique areas of concern.

Programmatic Example

Lets take coffee for example. First of all we have a simple coffee implementing the coffee interface

interface Coffee
{
    public function getCost();
    public function getDescription();
}

class SimpleCoffee implements Coffee
{
    public function getCost()
    {
        return 10;
    }

    public function getDescription()
    {
        return 'Simple coffee';
    }
}

We want to make the code extensible to allow options to modify it if required. Lets make some add-ons (decorators)

class MilkCoffee implements Coffee
{
    protected $coffee;

    public function __construct(Coffee $coffee)
    {
        $this->coffee = $coffee;
    }

    public function getCost()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getCost() + 2;
    }

    public function getDescription()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getDescription() . ', milk';
    }
}

class WhipCoffee implements Coffee
{
    protected $coffee;

    public function __construct(Coffee $coffee)
    {
        $this->coffee = $coffee;
    }

    public function getCost()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getCost() + 5;
    }

    public function getDescription()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getDescription() . ', whip';
    }
}

class VanillaCoffee implements Coffee
{
    protected $coffee;

    public function __construct(Coffee $coffee)
    {
        $this->coffee = $coffee;
    }

    public function getCost()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getCost() + 3;
    }

    public function getDescription()
    {
        return $this->coffee->getDescription() . ', vanilla';
    }
}

Lets make a coffee now

$someCoffee = new SimpleCoffee();
echo $someCoffee->getCost(); // 10
echo $someCoffee->getDescription(); // Simple Coffee

$someCoffee = new MilkCoffee($someCoffee);
echo $someCoffee->getCost(); // 12
echo $someCoffee->getDescription(); // Simple Coffee, milk

$someCoffee = new WhipCoffee($someCoffee);
echo $someCoffee->getCost(); // 17
echo $someCoffee->getDescription(); // Simple Coffee, milk, whip

$someCoffee = new VanillaCoffee($someCoffee);
echo $someCoffee->getCost(); // 20
echo $someCoffee->getDescription(); // Simple Coffee, milk, whip, vanilla