Helix principles when using different page templates

Question

While working on various Helix project implementations, I heard different opinions on how to deal with different page types in a Feature. I have these two examples:

1. Let's say that we have the Metadata feature which displays the meta title for all pages. What would be the approach if for example the meta title needs to be dynamically changed for the News items in the News feature project (these don't have a meta tile field and needs to be calculated)?
2. If in the News feature project there is a need to read only some fields from the ancestors (which will be used in the html), those Templates/Field being part of a different Feature, for example Themes.

What is the recommended practice in these situations? Are there any cases where a method would be duplicated in two features (like in the 2nd example) or should this always be moved to the Foundation layer?

Thanks for the help and sorry if the question is opinion based only.

Answer 1

Let me share my thoughts about your question.

I think if you need to duplicate something - stop and think about what you did wrong :)

Move functionality into Foundation Layer - is a better idea for this if you cannot re-architecture your approach or feature.

Probably, you can make an abstraction that doesn't depend on a feature and move it to the Foundation level. This also allows you to reuse this functionality in every feature.

Thanks for a good question that requires to think :)