Regulator / FlowControlManager Pattern

Regulator is the object which holds the responsibility of managing the control flow between group of related objects by handling the state change of the objects and passing messages between them.

Components

Regulator / FowControlManager : Holds the instances of related objects (Colleagues) and observes the Colleagues for change in their state.
 Colleague : Ability to notify the change in its state and focuses on its core responsibility. Wont hold reference to any of related objects or Regulator.

Scenario

Consideration : Silverlight application following MVVM.
Generally in Silverlight applications we use to separate the application into individual modules in order to create seperate XAP files and download to use it as and when needed. Let us imagine such a small module which has a landing page displaying some details along with few links(Detail1,Detail2). Upon clicking the links, the respective views(DetailView1, DetailView2) need to be displayed on the desiered location on the landing page itself. Also different messages need to be sent to different views based on the behavior and actions performed in other views and landing page.

Simply we can handle this by hand over the entire responsibility to the ViewModel of the landing page. If we do so, the landing ViewModel need to hold this control flow management and message passing mechanism in addition to its functionality.

Instead if we have an object that manages the flow control and message passing, then the respective ViewModels can just concentrate on their functionality without bothering about flow of control and message passing.

If Detail1 link is clicked on the landing page, Regulator takes this responsibility by observing Detail1 link got clicked on landing page, pass required details to the DetailView1.ViewModel and passes the DetailView1 to the LandingPage.

Component Responsibility

Colleagues just notifies about change of state which need to be observed.Regulator observes the state changes of the Colleagues as it holds their instances, passes the needed messages to respective instances and controls the flow.
State change can be notified through effective use of events and NotifyPropertyChanged mechanism we use in Silverlight.

Related patterns

Most of you might have already smelled the flavour of Mediator, Observer and Facade pattern.
Its true but the notion differs.
Unlike Mediator pattern, Colleagues in Regulator pattern won't hold reference to Regulator instance. Regulator itself subscribes to required state change notification of Colleagues.

Edit
10JAN2011
My friend upon having a glimpse at the title asked me where did I got the title from? Actually I should have specified about this at time of writing the article itself. I just named it based on the functionality and nature of implementation. Just thinking whether I've done anything unlawful.