Private this As TSomething

A post on Code Review recently caught my attention (emphasis mine):

If you are setting up a class, don’t encapsulate a Type inside of it – you are only repeating what a class does! I am not sure where this anti-pattern comes from.

The author of these words didn’t use the term “anti-pattern” in the same way I would have… They didn’t mean it as the toxic coding practices I use it for (I know, I asked!). But they aren’t seeing the benefits of it, and ultimately consider it clutter… and that’s where we disagree, regardless of whether “anti-pattern” is incendiary wording or not.

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you’ve probably noticed this rather consistent (VBA code written before 2015 doesn’t count!) pattern in my writing of class modules: whenever I need a class, I start by declaring a Private Type for its private instance fields, always named after the class module itself and prefixed with an admittedly rather “Hungarian” T prefix; then the only actual private field in the class is a Private this variable, like this:

Option Explicit
Private Type TPerson
FirstName As String
LastName As String
End Type
Private this As TPerson

Public Property Get FirstName() As String
FirstName = this.FirstName
End Property

Public Property Let FirstName(ByVal value As String)
this.FirstName = value
End Property

Public Property Get LastName() As String
LastName = this.LastName
End Property

Public Property Let LastName(ByVal value As String)
this.LastName = value
End Property

The same class module would “normally” look something like this:

Option Explicit
Private mFirstName As String
Private mLastName As String

Public Property Get FirstName() As String
FirstName = mFirstName
End Property

Public Property Let FirstName(ByVal pFirstName As String)
mFirstName = pFirstName
End Property

Public Property Get LastName() As String
LastName = mLastName
End Property

Public Property Let LastName(ByVal pLastName As String)
mLastName = pLastName
End Property

Yes, it’s less code. So what’s my problem with it?

Several things.

  • Properties and their respective backing field don’t (can’t) use the same identifier.
  • That m prefix is pure clutter that’s only there to say “hey look, this is a private field /module variable!” – in other words, it’s Systems Hungarian notation and does nothing other than increase the cognitive load. Even worse with an underscore, which wrecks the consistent camelCase/PascalCase conventions of literally everything written in any VB dialect.
  • It’s not true that using such Hungarian prefixes helps with autocompletion and IntelliSense. If the class has 5 properties that happen to start with a M, then your 5 backing fields are intertwined with 10 public members (so, drowned, really) that also start with an M.
  • Mutator parameters aren’t consistent either. That p prefix is just as annoying, and I’ll go as far as to say that this m-for-member and p-for-parameter convention is exactly what’s behind the fact that many VBA programmers have never dared implementing a class module “because it’s too confusing” and hard to follow.
  • The locals debugging toolwindow becomes cluttered with all the private fields duplicating the Property Get membersvalues.
mFields-locals
The Locals toolwindow, showing fields and properties as members of Me.

With my “anti-pattern”, there’s a little bit more code, yes. But:

  • Properties and their respective backing field consistently use the same identifier. IntelliSense / autocomplete for my fields consistently only ever includes the backing fields, and all I had to do was to type this..
  • No need for any Hungarian prefix anywhere. I use T for the type declaration (I also use I for interfaces, like in .NET and most C-based languages), because I find that using the class identifier (which would be perfectly legal) would be potentially confusing in Private this As Class1, since in any other context (outside the class module itself) the identifier Class1 in an As clause would be referring to the Class1 class.
  • Parameter names are always explicitly passed ByVal and named value. Yes, this makes Range.Value show up as Range.value, but VBA being case-insensitive, it makes no difference whatsoever. I could have used any other identifier, but value is what VB.NET and C# use; besides RHS isn’t quite as sexy, if more semantically correct. But naming parameters after the property member is an objectively horrible idea; all you see is a soup of mFoo, pFoo and Foo with assignment operators in between.
  • The locals debugging toolwindow now nicely regroups all the fields under this, so the object’s state is much easier to browse and understand at a glance.
  • If you ever need to serialize an object’s state to a binary file, then all you need to do is to Put #fileHandle this and you’re done. The inverse process is just as simple: no need to enumerate the properties one by one, convert them, or manipulate them in any way.
TPerson-locals
The Locals toolwindow, showing properties as members of Me, and a collapsed this member encapsulating the otherwise redundant fields.

I’d love to hear exactly what’s wrong with this “anti-pattern” of mine – I’ve grown pretty fond of it in the past couple years, and until someone can show me how and why I’m actively hurting something somewhere with it, I’ll keep using it in my own code, and posting Code Review and Stack Overflow answers featuring it.. and my blog posts will keep using it too.

One concern raised, was that a UDT doesn’t play well with collections. But this UDT isn’t going to end up in a collection anytime soon – and even if the class instance went into a collection, the encapsulated UDT couldn’t care less: all it does is regrouping the class’ internal state. Code outside the class doesn’t know about it, and couldn’t if it wanted.

You might be worried that a UDT incurs additional overhead… but it doesn’t: it simply provides a convenient structure to organize the private fields of a class. Two Long private fields allocate 4 bytes each and total 8 bytes; a UDT with two Long members allocates a total of 8 bytes, as Len(this) shows. What’s an easy way to know how much space the instance fields of a class take up?

Rubberduck has an encapsulate field refactoring that makes a public field private, renames it, and introduces Property Get and appropriate Property Let/Set mutators for it.

For a while I’ve been considering implementing a feature that builds on this Private Type [anti?] pattern, but held back because I didn’t want Rubberduck to enforce my coding style… although… I would love to be able to just declare my private type and my this private field, parse, and then right-click the UDT field and have Rubberduck generate all the Property Get/Let/Set boilerplate for me.

Would that make it more compelling?

Factories: Parameterized Object Initialization

Creating objects is something we do all the time. When we Set foo = New Something, we create a new instance of the Something class and assign that object reference to the foo variable, which would have been declared locally with Dim foo As Something.

With New

Often, you wish to instantiate Something with initial values for its properties – might look like this:

Dim foo As Something
Set foo = New Something
With foo
    .Bar = 42
    .Ducky = "Quack"
    '...
End With

Or, you could be fancy and make Something have a Self property that returns, well, the instance itself, like this:

Public Property Get Self() As Something
    Set Self = Me
End Property

But why would we do that? Because then we can leverage the rather elegant With New syntax:

Dim foo As Something
With New Something
    .Bar = 42
    .Ducky = "Quack"
    '...
    Set foo = .Self
End With

The benefits are perhaps more apparent with a factory method:

Public Function NewSomething(ByVal initialBar As Long, ByVal initialDucky As String) As Something
    With New Something
        .Bar = initialBar
        .Ducky = initialDucky
        Set NewSomething = .Self
    End With
End Function

See, no local variable is needed here, the With block holds the object reference. If we weren’t passing that reference down the call stack by returning it to the caller, the End With would have terminated that object. Not everybody knows that a With block can own an object reference like this, using With New. Without the Self property, a local variable would be needed in order to be able to assign the return value, because a With block doesn’t provide a handle to the object reference it’s holding.

Now the calling code can do this:

Dim foo As Something
Set foo = Factories.NewSomething(42, "Quack")

Here the NewSomething function is located in a standard module (.bas) named Factories. The code would have also been legal without qualifying NewSomething with the module name, but if someone is maintaining that code without Rubberduck to tell them by merely clicking on the identifier, meh, too bad for them they’ll have to Shift+F2 (go to definition) on NewSomething and waste time and break their momentum navigating to the Factories module it’s defined in – or worse, looking it up in the Object Browser (F2).

Where to put it?

In other languages, objects can be created with a constructor. In VBA you can’t have that, so you use a factory method instead. Factories manufacture objects, they create things.

In my opinion, the single best place to put a factory method isn’t in a standard/procedural module though – it’s on the class itself. I want my calling code to look something like this:

Dim foo As Something
Set foo = Something.Create(42, "Quack")

Last thing I want is some “factory module” that exposes a method for creating instances of every class in my project. But how can we do this? The Create method can’t be invoked without an instance of the Something class, right? But what’s happening here, is that the instance is being automatically created by VBA; that instance is named after the class itself, and there’s a VB_Attribute in the class header that you need to tweak to activate it:

VERSION 1.0 CLASS
BEGIN
  MultiUse = -1  'True
END
Attribute VB_Name = "Something"      '#FunFact controlled by the "Name" property of the class module
Attribute VB_GlobalNameSpace = False '#FunFact VBA ignores this attribute
Attribute VB_Creatable = False       '#FunFact VBA ignores this attribute
Attribute VB_PredeclaredId = True    '<~ HERE!
Attribute VB_Exposed = False         '#FunFact controlled by the "Instancing" property of the class module

The attribute is VB_PredeclaredId, which is False by default. At a low level, each object instance has an ID; by toggling this attribute value, you tell VBA to pre-declare that ID… and that’s how you get what’s essentially a global-scope free-for-all instance of your object.

That can be a good thing… but as is often the case with forms (which also have a predeclared ID), storing state in that instance leads to needless bugs and complications.

Interfaces

The real problem is that we really have two interfaces here, and one of them (the factory) shouldn’t be able to access instance data… but it needs to be able to access the properties of the object it’s creating!

If only there was a way for a VBA class to present one interface to the outside world, and another to the Create factory method!

VERSION 1.0 CLASS
BEGIN
  MultiUse = -1  'True
END
Attribute VB_Name = "ISomething"
Attribute VB_GlobalNameSpace = False
Attribute VB_Creatable = False
Attribute VB_PredeclaredId = False
Attribute VB_Exposed = False
Option Explicit

Public Property Get Bar() As Long
End Property

Public Property Get Ducky() As String
End Property

This would be some ISomething class: an interface that the Something class will implement.

The Something class would look like this- Notice that it only exposes Property Get accessors, and that the Create method returns the object through the ISomething interface:

VERSION 1.0 CLASS
BEGIN
  MultiUse = -1  'True
END
Attribute VB_Name = "Something"
Attribute VB_GlobalNameSpace = False
Attribute VB_Creatable = False
Attribute VB_PredeclaredId = True
Attribute VB_Exposed = False
Option Explicit
Private Type TSomething
    Bar As Long
    Ducky As String
End Type

Private this As TSomething
Implements ISomething

Public Function Create(ByVal initialBar As Long, ByVal initialDucky As String) As ISomething
    With New Something
        .Bar = initialBar
        .Ducky = initialDucky
        Set Create = .Self
    End With
End Function

Public Property Get Self() As ISomething
    Set Self = Me
End Property

Public Property Get Bar() As Long
    Bar = this.Bar
End Property

Friend Property Let Bar(ByVal value As Long)
    this.Bar = value
End Property

Public Property Get Ducky() As String
    Ducky = this.Ducky
End Property

Friend Property Let Ducky(ByVal value As String)
    this.Ducky = value
End Property

Private Property Get ISomething_Bar() As Long
    ISomething_Bar = Bar
End Property

Private Property Get ISomething_Ducky() As String
    ISomething_Ducky = Ducky
End Property

The Friend properties would only be accessible within that project; if that’s not a concern then they could also be Public, doesn’t really matter – the calling code only really cares about the ISomething interface:

With Something.Create(42, "Quack")
    Debug.Print .Bar 'prints 42
    .Bar = 42 'illegal, member not on interface
End With

Here the calling scope is still tightly coupled with the Something class though. But if we had a factory interface…

VERSION 1.0 CLASS
BEGIN
  MultiUse = -1  'True
END
Attribute VB_Name = "ISomethingFactory"
Attribute VB_GlobalNameSpace = False
Attribute VB_Creatable = False
Attribute VB_PredeclaredId = False
Attribute VB_Exposed = False
Option Explicit

Public Function Create(ByVal initialBar As Long, ByVal initialDuck As String) As ISomething
End Function

…and made Something implement that interface…

Implements ISomething
Implements ISomethingFactory

Public Function Create(ByVal initialBar As Long, ByVal initialDucky As String) As ISomething
    With New Something
        .Bar = initialBar
        .Ducky = initialDucky
        Set Create = .Self
    End With
End Function

Private Function ISomethingFactory_Create(ByVal initialBar As Long, ByVal initialDucky As String) As ISomething
    Set ISomethingFactory_Create = Create(initialBar, initialDucky)
End Function

…now we basically have an abstract factory that we can pass around to everything that needs to create an instance of Something or, even cooler, of anything that implements the ISomething interface:

Option Explicit

Public Sub Main()
    Dim factory As ISomethingFactory
    Set factory = Something.Self
    With MyMacro.Create(factory)
        .Run
    End With
End Sub

Of course this is a contrived example. Imagine Something is rather some SqlDataService encapsulating some ADODB data access, and suddenly it’s possible to execute MyMacro.Run without hitting a database at all, by implementing the ISomething and ISomethingFactory interfaces in some FakeDataService class that unit tests can use to test-drive the logic without ever needing to hit a database.

A factory is a creational pattern that allows us to parameterize the creation of an object, and even abstract away the very concept of creating an instance of an object, so much that the concrete implementation we’re actually coding against, has no importance anymore – all that matters is the interface we’re using.

Using interfaces, we can segregate parts of our API into different “views” of the same object and, benefiting from coding conventions, achieve get-only properties that can only be assigned when the object is initialized by a factory method.

If you really want to work with a specific implementation, you can always couple your code with a specific Something – but if you stick to coding against interfaces, you’ll find that writing unit tests to validate your logic without testing your database connections, the SQL queries, the presence of the data in the database, the network connectivity, and all the other things that can go wrong, that you have no control over, and that you don’t need to cover in a unit test, …will be much easier.

The whole setup likely isn’t a necessity everywhere, but abstract factories, factory methods, and interfaces, remain useful tools that are good to have in one’s arsenal… and Rubberduck will eventually provide tooling to generate all that boilerplate code.

Sounds like fun? Help us do it!

Coming soon, in Rubberduck 2.2

The last “green” release was a couple of months ago already – time to take a step back, look at all we’ve done, and call it a “minor” update.

What’s up duck?

Functionality-wise, not much. Bug fixes, yes; this means fewer inspection false positives, fewer caching accidents, overall more stable usage. But this time some serious progress was also made in the COM & RCW management area, and Rubberduck 2.2 no longer crashes on exit, or leave a dangling host process, or brick the VBE on reload. Some components are still stubbornly refusing to properly release, so unload+reload is still a not-recommended thing to do, but doing so no longer causes access violations. Which is neat, because this particular problem had been plaguing Rubberduck since the early days of 2.0.

Source Control Disintegration

If you haven’t been following the project since v2.1 was released, you may be disappointed to learn that we are officially dropping the source control integration feature. Not saying it’ll never resurface, but the feature was never really stable, and rather than drain our limited resources on a nice but non-essential feature, we focused on the “core” stuff for now. So instead of keeping the half-baked, half-broken thing in place, we removed it – entirely, so there’s 0 chance any part of it interferes with anything else (there were hooks in place, handling parser state changes and some VBE events).

The “Export Project” functionality remains though, so you can still use your favorite source control provider (Git, SVN, Mercurial, etc.) – Rubberduck just isn’t providing a UI to wrap that provider’s functionality anymore.

Shiny & New

We have new inspections! Rubberduck can now tell you when a Case block is semantically unreachable. Or when For loops specify a redundant Step 1, or if you prefer having an explicit Step clause everywhere, it can tell you about that too. Another inspection warns about error-handling suppression (On Error Resume Next) that is never restored (On Error GoTo 0). If you’re unfortunate enough to encounter the thoroughly evil Def[Type] statements, you’ll be relieved to know that Rubberduck will now warn you about implicitly typed identifiers.

Code Metrics is an entirely new tool, that evaluates cyclomatic complexity and nesting levels of each method and module. The feature clearly needs some UI work (wink wink, nudge nudge, C#/WPF reader), and enhancement ideas are always welcome.

The unit test execution engine no longer invokes the host application. There’s a bit of black magic going on here, but to keep it simple, the unit testing feature now works in every single VBE host application.

But the most spectacular changes aren’t really tangible, user-facing things. We’ve streamlined settings, upgrated our grammars from Antlr4.3 to Antlr4.6 – which fixed a number of parser issues, including significant performance improvements when parsing long Boolean expressions; the IInspection interface was fine-tuned again, COM object references were removed in a number of critical places. If you have a fork of the project, you already know that we’ve split Rubberduck.dll into Rubberduck.Core.dll and Rubberduck.Main.dll, with the entry point and IoC configuration in ‘Main’.

Oh, I lied. One of the most spectacular changes is a tangible, user-facing thing. It’s just not exactly in the main code base, is all. Poor installer, always gets left behind.

Administrative Privileges no longer needed!

Since a couple of pre-release builds, the Rubberduck installer supports per-user installs that no longer require admin privs. This means Rubberduck can now be installed on a locked-down workstation, without requiring IT intervention! This revamped installer also detects and properly uninstalls a previous Rubberduck install (admin elevation would be required to uninstall a per-machine installation of a previous build though), so manually uninstalling through the control panel before upgrading, is no longer recommended/needed. Doesn’t hurt, but shouldn’t change anything, really.

The “installating / instructions” and “contributing / initial setup” wiki pages have been updated accordingly on GitHub.

This new installer no longer assumes Microsoft Office is present, and registers for both 32 and 64-bit host applications.


That’s it? What happened to the rest of 2.1.x?

I did say “minor update”, yeah? The previously announced roadmap for 2.1.x was too ambitious, and not much of it is shipping in this release. In fact, that roadmap should have said “2.x”… versioning is hard, okay? If we stuck to 2.1.x, then a v2.2 would have been moot, since by then we would have had much of 3.0 in place.

Anyway, 2.2 is a terrific improvement over 2.1, on many levels – and that can only mean one thing: that the current development cycle will inevitably lead to even more awesomeness!

RD2018