Refactoring Primitive Obsession

Primitive Obsession means using a programming language's generic type instead of an application-specific domain object. Some examples are using an integer for an ID, a string for an address, a list for an address book etc. Others have explained why to fix it - this article is about how to fix it.

You can see an example of refactoring Primitive Obsession in James Shore's Let's Play TDD episodes 13-18. For a quick overview, you may watch episode #14 at 10-12 min and episode #15 at 0-3 min, to see him plugging in the TaxRate class.

The sooner the Primitive Obsession is fixed, the easier it is. In the above videos it takes just a couple of minutes to plug in the TaxRate class, but the Dollars class takes over half an hour. James does the code changes manually, without automated refactorings. For a big project with rampant Primitive Obsession it will easily take many hours, even days, to fix the problem of a missing core domain type.

Here I'm presenting some tips of using fully automated refactorings to solve Primitive Obsession. I'm using IntelliJ IDEA's Java refactorings, but the ideas should, to some extent, be applicable also to IDEs with inferior refactoring support.

The Example

Let's assume that we have a project that uses lots of "thingies" which are saved in a database. The thingies each have an ID that at the moment is just an integer. To avoid the thingy IDs getting mixed with other kinds of IDs, we create the following value object:

public final class ThingyId {

    private final int id;

    public ThingyId(int id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public int toInt() {
        return id;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
        if (!(obj instanceof ThingyId)) {
            return false;
        }
        ThingyId that = (ThingyId) obj;
        return this.id == that.id;
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return id;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return getClass().getSimpleName() + "(" + id + ")";
    }
}

Creating such a class is easy, but putting it to use is not so when the primitive ID is used in a couple of hundred places…

Starting Small

Refactoring Primitive Obsession is quite mechanical, but because it requires cascading changes, it's very easy to mess things up. So it's best to start small and proceed in small steps.

It makes sense to start from a central place from where the change can be propagated to the whole application. For example by starting to use ThingyId inside this one class, without changing its public interface:

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

This example refactoring had to be done manually, because the field was mutable (we must update all reads and writes to the field in one step), but the following refactorings can be done with the help of automatic refactorings.

Pushing Arguments Out

When there is a method which wraps one of its arguments into ThingyId, we can propagate it by pushing the act of wrapping outside the method. In IntelliJ IDEA this can be done with the Extract Parameter (Ctrl+Alt+P) refactoring:

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Pushing Return Values

When there is a method which unwraps its return value from ThingyId to int, we can propagate the unwrapping outside the method. There is no built-in refactoring for that, but it can be accomplished by combining Extract Method (Ctrl+Alt+M) and Inline (Ctrl+Alt+N).

First extract a method that does the same as the old method, but does not unwrap ThingyId. Then inline the original method and rename the new method to be the same as the original method.

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Pushing Return Values of Interface Methods

A variation of the previous refactoring is required when the method is part of an interface. IntelliJ IDEA 12 does not support inlining abstract methods (I would like it to ask that which of the implementations to inline), but since IDEA can refactor code that doesn't compile, we can copy and paste the implementation into the interface and then inline it:

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Pushing Arguments In

Instead of trying to refactor a method's arguments from the method caller's side, it's better to go inside the method and use Extract Parameter (Ctrl+Alt+P) as described earlier. Likewise for a method's return value. This leaves us with some redundant code, as can be seen in this example. We'll handle that next.

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Removing Redundancy

By following the above tips you will probably end up with some redundant wrapping and unwrapping such as new ThingyId(thingyId.toInt()) which is the same as thingyId. Changing one such thing manually would be easy, but the problem is that there are potentially tens or hundreds of places to change. In IntelliJ IDEA those can be fixed with one command: Replace Structurally (Ctrl+Shift+M).

In the following example we use the search template "new ThingyId($x$.toInt())" and replacement template "$x$". For extra type safety, the $x$ variable can be defined (under the Edit Variables menu) to be an expression of type ThingyId.

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Updating Constants

When there are constants (or final fields) of the old type, as is common in tests, those can be updated by extracting a new constant of the new ThingyId type, redefining the old constant to be an unwrapping of the new constant, and finally inlining the old constant:

(Cannot see the video? Watch it as GIF)

Finding the Loose Ends

The aforementioned refactorings must be repeated many times until the whole codebase has been migrated. To find out what refactoring to do next, search for the usages of the new type's constructor and its unwrapping method (e.g. ThingyId.toInt()). Use an appropriate refactoring to push that usage one step further. Repeat until all the usages are at the edges of the application (e.g. saving ThingyId to database) and cannot be pushed any further.

And as always, run all your tests after every step. If the tests fail and you cannot fix them within one minute, you're about to enter Refactoring Hell and it's the fastest that you revert your changes to the last time when all tests passed. Reverting is the easiest with IntelliJ IDEA's Local History which shows every time that you ran your tests and whether they passed or failed, letting you revert all your files to that time. The other option is to commit frequently, after every successful change (preferably rebased before pushing), and revert using git reset --hard.

---

This article was originally published at my company's blog.