The Composite Pattern is a structural design pattern that enables us to treat individual and group objects uniformly by creating a hierarchical (tree-like) structure of objects, where both the composite (groups) objects and leaf (individual) objects share a standard interface.
This pattern lets clients treat individual objects and compositions of objects uniformly. That means the client can access the individual objects or the composition of objects in a uniform manner. It’s useful for representing hierarchical structures such as file systems, UI components, or organizational structures.
What are Composite and Leaf classes?
- The Composite Class — represents a group of objects and can contain other objects (i.e. env_item_collection, env_item_collection_parent, env_root), and
- the Leaf Class — represents an individual object that cannot contain other objects (i.e. env_item).
