Why is it bad practice to call an eventhandler from code?

Question

Say you have a menu item and a button that do the same task. Why is it bad practice to put the code for the task into one control's action event and then make a call to that event from the other control? Delphi allows this as does vb6 but realbasic doesn't and says you should put the code into a method that is then called by both the menu and the button

Answer 1

It's a question of how your program is organized. In the scenario you've described, the menu item's behavior will be defined in terms of the button's:

procedure TJbForm.MenuItem1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  // Three different ways to write this, with subtly different
  // ways to interpret it:

  Button1Click(Sender);
  // 1. "Call some other function. The name suggests it's the
  //    function that also handles button clicks."

  Button1.OnClick(Sender);
  // 2. "Call whatever method we call when the button gets clicked."
  //    (And hope the property isn't nil!)

  Button1.Click;
  // 3. "Pretend the button was clicked."
end;

Any of those three implementations will work, but why should the menu item be so dependent on the button? What's so special about the button that it should define the menu item? If a new UI design did away with buttons, what would happen to the menu? A better way is to factor out the event handler's actions so it's independent of the controls it's attached to. There are a few ways to do that:

1. One is to get rid of the MenuItem1Click method altogether and assign the Button1Click method to the MenuItem1.OnClick event property. It's confusing to have methods named for buttons assigned to menu items' events, so you'll want to rename the event handler, but that's OK, because unlike VB, Delphi's method names do not define what events they handle. You can assign any method to any event handler as long as the signatures match. Both components' OnClick events are of type TNotifyEvent, so they can share a single implementation. Name methods for what they do, not what they belong to.

2. Another way is to move the button's event-handler code into a separate method, and then call that method from both components' event handlers:

   procedure HandleClick;
   begin
     // Do something.
   end;
   
   procedure TJbForm.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
   begin
     HandleClick;
   end;
   
   procedure TJbForm.MenuItem1Click(Sender: TObject);
   begin
     HandleClick;
   end;
   

   This way, the code that really does stuff isn't tied directly to either component, and that gives you the freedom to change those controls more easily, such as by renaming them, or replacing them with different controls. Separating the code from the component leads us to the third way:

3. The TAction component, introduced in Delphi 4, is designed especially for the situation you've described, where there are multiple UI paths to the same command. (Other languages and development environments provide similar concepts; it's not unique to Delphi.) Put your event-handling code in the TAction's OnExecute event handler, and then assign that action to the Action property of both the button and the menu item.

   procedure TJbForm.Action1Click(Sender: TObject);
   begin
     // Do something
     // (Depending on how closely this event's behavior is tied to
     // manipulating the rest of the UI controls, it might make
     // sense to keep the HandleClick function I mentioned above.)
   end;
   

   Want to add another UI element that acts like the button? No problem. Add it, set its Action property, and you're finished. No need to write more code to make the new control look and act like the old one. You've already written that code once.

   TAction goes beyond just event handlers. It lets you ensure that your UI controls have uniform property settings, including captions, hints, visibility, enabledness, and icons. When a command isn't valid at the time, set the action's Enabled property accordingly, and any linked controls will automatically get disabled. No need to worry about a command being disabled through the tool bar, but still enabled through the menu, for example. You can even use the action's OnUpdate event so that the action can update itself based on current conditions, instead of you needing to know whenever something happens that might require you to set the Enabled property right away.

Answer 2

Because you should separate internal logic to some other function and call this function...

1. from both event handlers
2. separately from code if you need to

This is a more elegant solution and is much easier to maintain.

Answer 3

This is an extension answer, as promised. In 2000 we have started to write an application using Delphi. This was one EXE and few DLL’s containing logic. This was movie industry, so there was customers DLL, booking DLL, box office DLL and billing DLL. When user wanted to do billing, he opened appropriate form, selected customer from a list, then OnSelectItem logic loaded customers theaters to next combo box, then after selecting theater next OnSelectItem event filled third combo box with information about the movies, that has not been billed yet. Last part of the process was pushing the button “Do Invoice”. Everything was done as an event procedures.

Then someone decided we should have extensive keyboard support. We have added calling event handlers from another even handlers.. The workflow of event handlers begun to complicate.

After two years someone decided to implement another feature – so that user working with customer data in another module (customers module) should be presented with a button titled “Invoice this customer”. This button should fire the invoice form and present it in such a state, like it was user who have been manually selecting all the data (the user was to be able to look at, make some adjustments, and press magic “Do Invoice” button). Since customer data was one DLL and billing was another, it was EXE that was passing messages. So the obvious idea was that customer data developer will have single routine with single ID as a parameter, and that all this logic will be inside billing module.
Imagine what happened. Since ALL logic was inside event handlers, we spent huge amount of time, trying actually not implement logic, but trying to mimic user activity – like choosing items, suspending Application.MessageBox inside event handlers using GLOBAL variables, and so one. Imagine – if we had even simple logic procedures called inside event handlers, we would have been able to introduce DoShowMessageBoxInsideProc Boolean variable to the procedure signature. Such a procedure could have been called with true parameter if called from event handler, and with FALSE parameters when called from external place.

So this is what have taught me not to put logic directly inside GUI event handlers, with a possible exception of small projects.

Answer 4

Separation of concerns. A private event for a class should be encapsulated within that class and not called from external classes. This makes your project easier to change down the road if you have strong interfaces between objects and minimize the occurences of multiple entry points.

Answer 5

Suppose at some point you decide that the menu item no longer makes sense, and you want to get rid of the menu item. If you just have one other control pointing to the menu item's event handler, that might not be a big problem, you can just copy the code into the button's event handler. But if you have several different ways the code can be invoked, you'll have to do a lot of changing.

Personally I like the way Qt handles this. There is a QAction class with it's own event handler that can be hooked, and then the QAction is associated with any UI elements that need to perform that task.

Answer 6

Another big reason is for testability. When event handling code is buried in the UI, the only way to test this is via either manual testing or automated testing that is heavily tied to the UI. (e.g. Open menu A, Click button B). Any change in the UI naturally can then break dozens of tests.

If the code is refactored into a module that deals exclusively with the job it needs to perform, then testing become a whole lot easier.

Answer 7

It is neater obviously. But ease of use and productivity is of course also always important.

In Delphi I generally refrain from it in serious apps, but I call eventhandlers in small stuff. If small stuff somehow morphes into something bigger, I clean it up, and usually at the same time increase logic-UI separation.

I do know though that it won't matter in Lazarus/Delphi. Other languages might have more special behaviour attached to eventhandlers.

Answer 8

Why is it bad practice? Because it is much easier to reuse code when it is not embedded into UI controls.

Why can't you do it in REALbasic? I doubt there's any technical reason; it's likely just a design decision they made. It certainly does enforce better coding practices.

Answer 9

Suppose at some time you decided that the menu should do something slightly differently. Perhaps this new change only happens under some specific circumstances. You forget about the button, but now you have changed its behaviour as well.

On the other hand if you call a function, you are less likely to change what it does, since you (or the next guy) knows that this will have bad consequences.