I am working with a library that has a class called Message. I need to have a way to determine if the message is a duplicate, a test message, or if it is one of a few other types of messages. The duplicate check will be made against a database. The rest of checks will be based on just the message itself.
The library Message class does not have methods to do this. Should I extend the Message class to add these methods or would it be better to add a Filter class with static methods that can do these checks?
Thanks in advance for your help.