This article describes the Iterator design pattern. This is a behavioral design pattern, a category of design pattern used by software engineers, when writing computer programs.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Iterator pattern is a design pattern, used in software engineering, to iterate through a collection of data. The iterator itself is concerned with the actual implementation of iteration, and provides abstract methods to traverse the data, without needing to know any specifics about the objects in the collection.


It is defined as a behavioral design pattern, because the program uses the iterator in it's execution to perform it's tasks.

Benefits

Abstracting the details of the collection away from the task of sequentially traversing through the objects allows us to process any kind of collection without the tight coupling of having to know anything about the objects. This leads to cleaner and more readable code.

Examples of the pattern

WPF and .Net has the IEnumerable Interface, which returns an IEnumerator.

 

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See Also

Link to domain parent articles and related articles in TechNet Wiki.

 

 

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Community Resources

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References section

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