PROTOTYPE PATTERN

The PROTOTYPE PATTERN comes under the classification of Creational Patterns. The creational patterns deals with the best way to create objects. This helps to copy or clone the existing objects to create new ones rather than creating from the scratch. 

Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by copying this prototype. -- "Design Patterns" Gamma et al., Addison-Wesley, ISBN:0-201-63361-2" 

The prototype pattern is used when creating an instance of a class is very time consuming or complex in some way. Then rather than creating more instances, it is possible to make copies of the original instances and modifying them as appropriate. 

When we are not in a position to call a constructor for an object directly, we could alternatively clone a pre-existing object  (a prototype) of the same class. When there are many subclasses that differ only in the kind of objects they create a Prototype Pattern can be used to reduce the number of subclasses by cloning a prototype. Prototype Design Pattern helps in reducing number of classes. 

For example suppose we have to do say Sales Analysis on a set of data in the database. Normally we will create an object encapsulating this data and do the Sales Analysis. Suppose now we have to do another type of analysis say Promotion Analysis on the same data. Now instead of creating another object corresponds to the data from the scratch, we can clone the existing object and do the analysis. This is one of the classical use of prototype pattern.  

Remember that in C#, this pattern can be implemented easily by using the clone(). Any class, which wants to support cloning, should inherit from the ICloneable interface in C#. ICloneable interface contains a Clone() method which we can override in our class. Clone can be implemented either as a deep copy or a shallow copy. In a deep copy, all objects are duplicated; whereas, in a shallow copy, only the top-level objects are duplicated and the lower levels contain references.

The resulting clone must be of the same type as or a compatible type to the original instance.