There are another questions that seems to ask the same, but it is not still clear for me some aspects when I have to work with one aggregate root (AR) that need information from another AG.
One similiar question is this, DDD: aggregate root needs information from another aggregate root, but it is still not clear some things.
My doubt is this. Supose that I have Order and Buyer. I guess both are AG (if some guess is incorrect, correct me). Suponse that the order needs information of the buyer, for example if the buyer is allows to make orders or not.
One of the rules in DDD is that an AG can't have a reference to the object to another AG, only the ID, so my Order AG would be like this:
Order
{
long Id,
BuyerId,
....
}
In the question that I linked above, it is said: "If the domain logic for Screening requires gender and birth date, then you are going to need to get copies of those values into the aggregate".
It tells it is needed to have the values into the aggregate. Does this mean that in this case, could I have a reference to the object of the buyer instead of the ID?
Or perhaps I could have another option, to use a factory to create an order, that receive the ID of the buyer, then the factory request the information to the BuyerRepository, do the check and if the buyer can make orders, then assign the ID to the order.
This in the creation. But another case is for example when I need to show the information in the UI to the user. do I need to do two queries for that? One to get the information of the order aggregate and another query to get the information of the related aggregate entities, and compiste the information in the UI?
Thanks.
Related
Suppose I have database tables Customer, Order, Item. I have OrderRepository that accesses, directly with SQL/my ORM, both the Order and Items table. E.g. I could have a method, getItems on the OrderRespositry that returns all items of that order.
Suppose I now also create ItemRepository. Given I now have 2 repositories accessing the same database table, is that generally considered poor design? My thinking is, sometimes a user wants to update the details about an Item (e.g. name), but when using the OrdersRepository, it doesn't really make sense to not be able to access the items directly (you want to know about all the items in an order)
Of course, the OrderRepository could internally create* an ItemRepository and call methods like getItemsById(ids: string[]). However, consider the case that I want to get all orders and items ever purchased by a Customer. Assuming you had the orderIds for a customer, you could have a getOrders(ids: string[]) on the OrderRepository to fetch all the orders and then do a second query to fetch all the Items. I feel you make your life harder (and less efficient) in the sense you have to do the join to match items with orders in the app code rather than doing a join in SQL.
If it's not considered bad practice, is there some kind of limit to how much overlap Repositories should have with each other. I've spent a while trying to search for this on the web, but it seems all the tutorials/blogs/vdieos really don't go further than 1 table per entity (which may be an anti-pattern).
Or am I missing a trick?
Thanks
FYI: using express with TypeScript (not C#)
is a repository creating another repository considered acceptable. shouldn't only the service layer do that?
It's difficult to separate the Database Model from the DDD design but you have to.
In your example:
GetItems should have this signature - OrderRepostiory.GetItems(Ids: int[]) : ItemEntity. Note that this method returns an Entity (not a DAO from your ORM). To get the ItemEntity, the method might pull information from several DAOs (tables, through your ORM) but it should only pull what it needs for the entity's hydration.
Say you want to update an item's name using the ItemRepository, your signature for that could look like ItemRepository.rename(Id: int, name: string) : void. When this method does it's work, it could change the same table as the GetItems above but note that it could also change other tables as well (For example, it could add an audit of the change to an AuditTable).
DDD gives you the ability to use different tables for different Contexts if you want. It gives you enough flexibility to make really bold choices when it comes the infrastructure that surrounds your domain. So ultimately, it's a matter of what makes sense for your specific situation and team. Some teams would apply CQRS and the GETOrder and Rename methods will look completely different under the covers.
I think this question has been asked but there are no clear answers.
The question is simple.
Can you have an entity list on the server.
For example I have a list of Product names on my database which can be really big. I want the intent to recognise these entities based on a list on the server.
The other thing I would like to do is filter an entity list.
e.g. I have a list of stores. I want it to be filtered by location, say by distance and lat long showing only stores near you when I ask a question.
Things which are so easy to do in apps seem so difficult in Dialogflow.
Please do not provide solutions which can be done on the server through webhooks. I already know about that and have used it.
I just want a better way to use entities so that the NLP can become more powerful.
The best way to do will be using Entities with webhook.
You may enable slot filling for the parameters.
In the webhook, have a set of stores based on locations and hashmap with the location as key and set of stores as value.
when the location is provided, fetch the corresponding set of stores.
when the store is provided, see if that store is present in the set.
reprompt if the information is not correct by resetting the context if required.
UPDATE
You may ask the user for the product names. Match the entity name with the names in DB. If present, use it if not, provide the user with some option from the DB that may match with what the user is saying and ask them to choose one. You need to think from a conversation point of view how two people communicate with each other.
I am currently just trying to learn some new programming patterns and I decided to give event sourcing a shot.
I have decided to model a warehouse as my aggregate root in the domain of shipping/inventory where the number of warehouses is generally pretty constant (i.e. a company wont be adding warehouses too often).
I have run into the question of how to set my aggregateId, which should correspond to a warehouse, on my server. Most examples I have seen, including this one, show the aggregate ID being generated server side when a new aggregate is being created (in my case a warehouse), and then passed in the command request when referring to that aggregate for subsequent commands.
Would you say this is the correct approach? Can I expect the user to know and pass aggregate Ids when issuing commands? I realize this is probably domain dependent and could also be a UI/UX choice as well, just wondering what other's have done. It would make more sense to me if the number of my event sourced aggregates were more frequent, such as with meal tabs or shopping carts.
Thanks!
Heuristic: aggregate id, in many cases, is analogous to the primary key used to distinguish entities in a database table. Many of the lessons of natural vs surrogate keys apply.
Can I expect the user to know and pass aggregate Ids when issuing commands?
You probably can't depend on the human to know the aggregate ids. But the client that the human operator is using can very well know them.
For instance, if an operator is going to be working in a single warehouse during a session, then we might look up the appropriate identifier, cache it, and use it when constructing messages on behalf of the user.
Analog: when you fill in a web form and submit it, the browser does the work of looking at the form action and using that information to construct the correct URI, and similarly the correct HTTP Request.
The client will normally know what the ID is, because it just got it during a previous query.
Creation patterns are weird. It can, in some circumstances, make sense for the client to choose the identifier to be used when creating a new aggregate. In others, it makes sense for the client to provide an identifier for the command message, and the server decides for itself what the aggregate identifier should be.
It's messaging, so you want to be careful about coupling the client directly to your internal implementation details -- especially if that client is under a different development schedule. If you get the message contract right, then the server and client can evolve in any way consistent with the contract at any time.
You may want to review Greg Young's 10 year retrospective, which includes a discussion of warehouse systems. TL;DR - in many cases the messages coming from the human operators are events, not commands.
Would you say this is the correct approach?
You're asking if one of Greg Young's Event Sourcing samples represents the correct approach... Given that the combination of CQRS and Event Sourcing was essentially (re)invented by Greg, I'd say there's a pretty good chance of that.
In general, letting the code that implements the Command-side generate a GUID for every Command, Event, or other persistent object that it needs to write is by far the simplest implementation, since GUIDs are guaranteed to be unique. In a distributed system, uniqueness without coordination is a big thing.
Can I expect the user to know and pass aggregate Ids when issuing commands?
No, and you particularly can't expect a user to know the GUID of their assets. What you may be able to do is to present the user with a list of his or her assets. Each item in the list will have the GUID associated, but it may not be necessary to surface that ID in the user interface. It's just data that the underlying UI object carries around internally.
In some cases, users do need to know the ID of some of their assets (e.g. if it involves phone support). In that case, you can add a lookup API to address that concern.
I have a system where actions of users need to be sent to other users who subscribe to those updates. There aren't a lot of users/subscribers at the moment, but it could grow rapidly so I want to make sure I get it right. Is it just this simple?
create table subscriptions (person_uuid uuid,
subscribes_person_uuid uuid,
primary key (person_uuid, subscribes_person_uuid)
)
I need to be able to look up things in both directions, i.e. answer the questions:
Who are Bob's subscribers.
Who does Bob subscribe to
Any ideas, feedback, suggestions would be useful.
Those two queries represent the start of your model:
you want the user to be the PK or part of the PK.
depending on the cardinality of subscriptions/subscribers you could go with:
for low numbers: using a single table and two sets
for high numbers: using 2 tables similar to the one you describe
#Jacob
Your use case looks very similar to the Twitter example, I did modelize it here
If you want to track both sides of relationship, I'll need to have a dedicated table to index them.
Last but not least, depending on the fact that the users are mutable OR not, you can decide to denormalize (e.g. duplicate User content) or just store user ids and then fetch users content in a separated table.
I've implemented simple join feature in Achilles. Have a look if you want to go this way
I haven't really seen any examples, but I assume that they are saved inside the containing entity table within the database.
Ie. If I have a Person entity/aggregate root and a corresponding Person table, if it had a Value Object called Address, Address values would be saved inside this Person table!
Does that make sense for a domain where I have other entities such as Companies etc. that have an Address?
(I'm currently writing a project management application and trying to get into DDD)
It's ok to store Value Objects in a separate table, for the very reasons you've described. However, I think you're misunderstanding Entities vs VOs - it's not a persistence related concern.
Here's an example:
Assume that a Company and Person both have the same mail Address. Which of these statements do consider valid?
"If I modify Company.Address, I want
Person.Address to automatically get
those changes"
"If I modify Company.Address, it
must not affect Person.Address"
If 1 is true, Address should be an Entity, and therefore has it's own table
If 2 is true, Address should be a Value Object. It could be stored as a component within the parent Entity's table, or it could have its own table (better database normalisation).
As you can see, how Address is persisted has nothing to do with Entity/VO semantics.
Most developers tend to think in the database first before anything else. DDD does not know about how persistence is handled. That's up to the repository to deal with that. You can persist it as an xml, sql, text file, etc etc. Entities/aggregates/value objects are concepts related to the domain.
Explanation by Vijay Patel is perfect.