Chain of Command is a design pattern. It is well documented, and has been successfully used in many software solutions. An article on Chain of command in .Net

In brief, this pattern involves a sequence of loosely coupled programming units, or handler objects. These objects are coupled together to form the links in a chain of handlers.

Each handler performs its processing logic, then potentially passes the processing request onto the next link (i.e. handler) in the chain. A client using the chain will only make one request for processing. After this request, the chain handlers work to do the processing.