Common usages for chain of responsibility?

Question

I saw a tutorial video explain the chain of responsibility design pattern, and I think I understand how it works but I'm not sure when I would really use it. What are some common usages of the chain of responsibility?

Answer 1

From the GoF:

Known Uses

Several class libraries use the Chain of Responsibility pattern to handle user events. They use different names for the Handler class, but the idea is the same: When the user clicks the mouse or presses a key, an event gets generated and passed along the chain. MacApp [App89] and ET++ [WGM88] call it "EventHandler," Symantec's TCL library [Sym93b] calls it "Bureaucrat," and NeXT's AppKit [Add94] uses the name "Responder."

The Unidraw framework for graphical editors defines Command objects that encapsulate requests to Component and ComponentView objects [VL90]. Commands are requests in the sense that a component or component view may interpret a command to perform an operation. This corresponds to the "requests as objects" approach described in Implementation. Components and component views may be structured hierarchically. A component or a component view may forward command interpretation to its parent, which may in turn forward it to its parent, and so on, thereby forming a chain of responsibility.

ET++ uses Chain of Responsibility to handle graphical update. A graphical object calls the InvalidateRect operation whenever it must update a part of its appearance. A graphical object can't handle InvalidateRect by itself, because it doesn't know enough about its context. For example, a graphical object can be enclosed in objects like Scrollers or Zoomers that transform its coordinate system. That means the object might be scrolled or zoomed so that it's partially out of view. Therefore the default implementation of InvalidateRect forwards the request to the enclosing container object. The last object in the forwarding chain is a Window instance. By the time Window receives the request, the invalidation rectangle is guaranteed to be transformed properly. The Window handles InvalidateRect by notifying the window system interface and requesting an update.