Design patterns and practices in .NET: the Chain of Responsibility pattern

Introduction

The Chain of Responsibility is an ordered chain of message handlers that can process a specific type of message or pass the message to the next handler in the chain. This pattern revolves around messaging between a sender and one more receivers. This probably sounds very cryptic – just like the basic description of design patterns in general – so let’s see a quick example in words.

Suppose we have a Sender that knows the first receiver in the messaging chain, call it Receiver A. Receiver A is in turn aware of Receiver B and so on. When a message comes in to a sender we can only perform one thing: pass it along to the first receiver. Receiver A inspects the message and decides whether it can process it or not. If not then it passes the message along to Receiver B and Receiver B will perform the…