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🚦🧱 CHAIN OF RESPONSIBILITY PATTERN EXPLAINED

December 15, 2025

🔸 TL;DR

The Chain of Responsibility pattern lets you pass a request along a chain of handlers, where each handler decides either to:

▪️ 🔁 Handle it

▪️ 📬 Pass it to the next handler

This keeps your code flexible, decoupled and extensible — you can add/remove behaviors without rewriting everything.

🔸 WHAT IS THE CHAIN OF RESPONSIBILITY?

▪️ A design pattern where multiple handlers get a chance to process the same request.

▪️ Each handler knows only the next one, not the whole chain.

▪️ The client sends the request to the first handler and doesn’t care who actually processes it.

🔸 TYPICAL USE CASES 💡

▪️ Request validation pipelines (e.g. auth → permissions → business rules).

▪️ Logging / monitoring layers.

▪️ HTTP middleware chains in web frameworks.

▪️ UI event handling (clicks bubbling up to parent components).

🔸 WHY USE IT? ✅

▪️ Single Responsibility: each handler does one thing well.

▪️ Open/Closed Principle: you add new handlers without touching existing ones.

▪️ Configurable flows: reorder or enable/disable handlers at runtime.

🔸 PITFALLS TO AVOID ⚠️

▪️ Chain too long ➜ debugging becomes painful.

▪️ No handler for a request ➜ define a default/fallback behavior.

▪️ Hidden control flow ➜ document the chain clearly (or visualize it).

🔸 KEY TAKEAWAYS 🧠

▪️ Think of it as a “pipeline of responsibilities”.

▪️ Great choice for validation, security, logging, cross-cutting concerns.

▪️ Keep each handler small, focused and testable.

▪️ Always define what happens if no one handles the request.

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