Unity: Decoupling Systems using Encoded strings

Sometimes, you might have multiple systems that flow in a single direction. If there is no need to update the previous system on the data that was passed down, systems can easily use encoded strings for decoupling.

For example, you might have a system based on MVC architecture, whereby data is passed unidirectionally from the model to the view.

To prevent coupling, instead of having the view query the model/controller, we can simply pass the data required as a string when invoking the view's presentation method.

E.g. You could have some kind of animation system that plays animations corresponding the the string that is passed to it.

Example Animation Method

public override float PlayAnimation(string animString)
    {
        if (animString.StartsWith("MyAnimation"))
        {
            var args = animString.Split("-");
            if (args.Length <= 1) //args missing
                return 0f;

            string paramString = args[1];
            int[] counts = new int[paramString.Length];

            for (int i = 0; i < paramString.Length; ++i)
            {
                counts[i] = int.Parse(paramString[i].ToString());
            }

            //Do stuff with counts
        }
    }

In this short snippet, the PlayAnimation function takes in a string that encodes an array of integers, e.g. "MyAnimation-12345".

The string is parsed, and split into its corresponding components for further processing; apart from the invocation, this function does not reference/touch other systems at all.

To be honest, most of this is just me talking out of my ass, TLDR: You can use strings to pass data in a decoupled way, which can be especially useful when dealing with uni-directional data flow.