The Composite design pattern
The Composite design pattern is another structural GoF pattern that helps us manage complex object structures. This pattern is best suited for representing part-whole hierarchies and treating individual objects and compositions uniformly. In contrast, the Decorator pattern is ideal for adding responsibilities to objects dynamically without altering their structure. Choose the Composite pattern when you work with tree-like structures and the Decorator pattern when you need to extend an object’s behavior without modifying its class.
Goal
The goal behind the Composite pattern is to create a hierarchical data structure where you don’t need to differentiate groups from single components, making the traversal and manipulation of the hierarchy easy for its consumers.
You could think of the Composite pattern as a way of building a graph or a tree with self-managing nodes.
