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Sammi Brie (talk | contribs) Adding local short description: "Behavioral design pattern in object-oriented programming", overriding Wikidata description "behavioral design pattern in object-oriented programming which defines the high-level skeleton of an operation to be implemented by helper methods" |
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* Subclasses of the base class "fill in" the empty or "variant" parts of the "template" with specific algorithms that vary from one subclass to another.<ref name=":1" /> It is important that subclasses do ''not'' override the ''template method'' itself.
At run-time, the algorithm represented by the template method is executed by sending the template message to an instance of one of the concrete subclasses. Through inheritance, the template method in the base class starts to execute. When the template method sends a message to self requesting one of the helper methods, the message will be received by the concrete sub-instance. If the helper method has been overridden, the overriding implementation in the sub-instance will execute; if it has not been overridden, the inherited implementation in the base class will execute. This mechanism ensures that the overall algorithm follows the same steps every time
This pattern is an example of [[inversion of control]] because the high-level code no longer determines what algorithms to run; a lower-level algorithm is instead selected at run-time.
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