persistence of private by the Nucleus pattern

The encapsulation of data by an object's methods is one of the foremost goals of effective OOP. Restricting exposure of the object's private information prevents other code from accessing it. The inaccessibility ensures that the other code can't depend upon or otherwise share responsibility for the private information. Each object has a single responsibility: a sovereign private realm of information and expertise.

However, this ideal conflicts with the reality of the need to give objects persistence because most programs require data storage in some form. And the required interaction with the storage mechanism clearly isn't the responsibility of the objects that happen to correspond to the data. Yet how can the objects responsible, often known as repositories or data mappers, mediate between external storage and other objects while obeying encapsulation? How can information be both private and persistent without the object itself assuming data storage responsibility?

The "Nucleus" design pattern, very similar to an Active Record, addresses this issue. According to the pattern, a persistent object, similar to a eukaryotic cell, contains a private inner object that acts as its "nucleus". The nucleus object's responsibilities are to hold and facilitate access to the persistent data of the object. Therefore its methods likely consist of nothing more than public "getters and setters" for the data properties (and possibly other methods that merely make the getters and setters more convenient), and one of its constructors has no parameters. It's a DTO or VO. It isn't normally present outside of its containing object since it has no meaningful behavior. Since the nucleus object is private, outside objects affect it only indirectly through the execution of the containing object's set of appropriate information-encapsulating methods. The containing object essentially uses the nucleus object as its own data storage mechanism. The nucleus is the "seed" of the object that contains no more and no less than all the data necessary to exactly replicate the object.  

Naturally, this increase in complexity affects the factory object responsible for assembly. It must initialize the nucleus object, whether based on defaults in the case of a new entity, or an external query performed by the storage-handling object in the case of a continuing entity. Then it must pass the nucleus object to the containing object's constructor. Finally, it takes a pair of weak references to the containing object and nucleus object and "registers" them with the relevant stateful storage-handling object that's embedded in the execution context.

The object pair registration is important. Later, when any code requests the storage-handling object to transfer the state of the containing object to external storage, the storage-handling object can refer to the registration list to match the containing object up to the nucleus object and call the public property methods on the nucleus object to determine what data values to really transfer.

Pro:

• The containing object doesn't contain public methods to get or set any private data of its responsibility.
• The containing object has no responsibility for interactions with external storage. It only handles the nucleus object.
• Since the nucleus object's responsibility is a bridge between external storage and the containing object, design compromises for the sake of the external storage implementation (e.g. a specific superclass?) are easier to accommodate without muddying the design and publicly-accessible "face" of the containing object.

Con:

• The nucleus object is one additional object/class for each persistent original object/class that uses the pattern. It's closely tied to the containing object, its factory object, and its storage-handling object.
• The original object must replace persistent data variable members with a private nucleus object member, and the containing object's methods must instead access persistent data values through the nucleus object's properties.
• The containing object's constructors must have a nucleus object parameter.
• The factory must construct the nucleus object, pass it to the containing object's constructor, and pass along weak references to the storage-handling object.
• The storage-handling object must maintain one or more lists of pairs of weak references to containing objects and nucleus objects. It also must use these lists whenever any code requests a storage task.
• The code in the storage-handling object must change to handle the nucleus object instead of the original object.