Code example of High Coupling

Code example of High Coupling

Consider a simple shopping cart application that uses a CartContents class to keep track of the items in the shopping cart and an Order class for processing a purchase. The Order needs to determine the total value of the contents in the cart, it might do that like so:

public class CartEntry
{
    public float Price;
    public int Quantity;
}

public class CartContents
{
    public CartEntry[] items;
}

public class Order
{
    private CartContents cart;
    private float salesTax;

    public Order(CartContents cart, float salesTax)
    {
        this.cart = cart;
        this.salesTax = salesTax;
    }

    public float OrderTotal()
    {
        float cartTotal = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < cart.items.Length; i++)
        {
            cartTotal += cart.items[i].Price * cart.items[i].Quantity;
        }
        cartTotal += cartTotal*salesTax;
        return cartTotal;
    }
}

Notice how the OrderTotal method (and thus the Order class) depends on the implementation details of the CartContents and the CartEntry classes. If we were to try to change this logic to allow for discounts, we'd likely have to change all 3 classes. Also, if we change to using a List collection to keep track of the items we'd have to change the Order class as well. So the above examples represents the classis example of tight coupling.