Chain of Responsibility Pattern

Kind: pattern

Layer: Design Patterns Core

Record: architecture:chain-of-responsibility-pattern

Severity: recommended

Scope: behavior, request handling, pipeline

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that passes a request along an ordered list of handlers until one of them handles it.

Listed in Architecture principles, after State Pattern and before Iterator Pattern.

Requires

• Uniform Handler Interface

Reinforces

• Open/Closed Principle (OCP)
• Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)

Enables

• Pluggable Handling
• Ordered Fallthrough

Conflicts with

• Monolithic Handler

In tension with

• Traceability

Tensions

• Chain of Responsibility Pattern / Traceability

Violated by

• Monolithic Handler

Severity

• recommended

Category

• Behavioral Patterns

Refactors

• Correlation ID

Linked from

• Core Modular Design
• SOLID / Object-Oriented Design
• Observability / Auditability / Traceability
• Behavioral Patterns
• Severity levels
• The resolutions