Business Object Model Design

Question

Hello Evryone,
I'm designing a new application for Incident Management.
There is an existing Incident System But, our application is targeted to end user facility.
So, we have to use the existing Incident Management system to store and get data, so that Incident can be loaded on booth side.
We access that datastore using WebServices with DAO Pattern.
In the existing system, they have Incident Attribute like Status, Alert, Priority,... with Integer as main identifier.
public class IncidentStatus {
     private int status;
     private String statusStr;
     public IncidentStatus () {
}In my application, i would like to have a good OO Model.
So, my idea is to use the Design Pattern "State" and/or "Strategy" for such a attribute.
So that i would have class/interface such as
- IncidentStatus (interface)
- IncidentOpened (impl)
- IncidentResolved (impl)
and so on ...
This involve a class for each case but, isn't it more OO oriented ?
any comment ?
Regards,
Sebastien Degardin

Answer 1

but do these IncidentStatus objects do anything other than represent the status? if not, I'd be inclined to agree with the other poster about enumerated types. if adding new ones dynamically is your bag, you could opt for having a single IncidentStatus class, and have instances which represent different statuses, described by (for instance) a String
another question to ask yourself is "how likely is it that I'll need to add a new IncidentStatus?". probably not very often. in any case, if the purpose of the IncidentStatus is merely to indicate status, I'd be looking to have just one class to represent them, and a config file which describes the individual statuses. adding a new one wouldn't even need to involve a programmer