View Factories: Why and When to Use Them
A view factory is a simple but powerful pattern in UI development. At its core, a view factory is just a function or object whose job is to create and return views (UI components) for you. Instead of building your views directly in every part of your code, you centralize the creation logic in one place.
Why would you want to do this? Imagine you have several screens in your app that use the same kind of button, but with slightly different labels or actions. Instead of repeating the button setup everywhere, you can use a view factory to generate the button with the right configuration. This keeps your code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and makes it much easier to update the look or behavior of your buttons in the future,just change the factory, and all buttons update automatically.
View factories are also great for testing. If you need to swap out a real view for a mock version in your tests, you can do that easily by changing what the factory returns. And if your app builds complex views with lots of dependencies, a factory can help manage that complexity by handling all the setup in one place.
You don’t need to overcomplicate things,a view factory can be as simple as a function that returns a view, or as advanced as a class that builds entire screens. The key is that you’re centralizing and reusing your UI creation logic, which leads to cleaner, more maintainable code.
In short, view factories help you build UIs faster, with less repetition and more flexibility. They’re a handy tool for any project with dynamic or reusable UI components.