I have 2 entities in Core Data:
- OperationCategory
- Operation
The OperationCategory has a to-many relationship to Operation called operations
The Operation has to-one relationship to OperationCategory called operationCategory
The operations relationship delete rule is set to Deny as an OperationCategory should not be deleted if there are still Operations connected to it
However if all the Operation items have been deleted the OperationCategory should be deleted automatically. Is there a smart way to do this or do I have to check the operations relationship with every save and delete it manually? Thanks for any input
Implement -[Operation prepareForDeletion] and tell the OperationCategory to delete itself if the Operation is the last one.
Related
I have domain concept of Product.
Product have some GeneralDetails, lets say: sku, name, description.
At the same time, Product have some ProductCalculations part where accountants can put different values like purchasePrice, stockLevelExpenses, wholeSalesPrice, retailPrice.
So, so far, Product would look something like:
class Product{
GeneralDetails Details;
ProductCalculations Calculations;
ChangeDetails(GeneralDetails details){}
Recalculate(ProductCalculations calculations{}
}
This setup would make Product an aggregate root. But now, i want to split it in a way that Product manager can input/update product details but then that accountant can step in and intependently change calculations for given product without concurrency issues.
That would suggest splitting it into 2 separate aggregate roots.
But then, deleting ProductDetails aggregate must mean deleting ProductCalculations too and it should happen in transactional way.
Assuming they are 2 aggregate roots, meaning they have 2 separate repositories with corresponding Delete methods, how to implement this as an atomic transaction?
The only thing i can think about is to raise event when ProductDetails gets deleted, have a handler (DomainService) that uses some special repository that handles transactions over multiple aggregate roots.
Is there some problem with that approach and/or is there some better way to handle it?
PS.
I cannot allow eventual consistency when ProductDetails is deleted.
PS2.
Based on comments from #Jon, Details and Calculations create&delete should be synced in a way that when Details are created/deleted, Calculations should also be created/deleted.
On the other hand, their updates should be completely independent.
I think the answer to your question depends somewhat on what data storage technology you're using and your data storage model, because if you can push operation transactionality to the data layer, things get much easier.
If you're using a document-oriented database (Cosmos DB, MongoDB, etc...), I would model and store your Product aggregate (including Details and Calculations) as a single document and you get the atomic transaction and concurrency checking for free from the database.
If you must store these as separate documents/records in your data store, then providing atomic transactions and concurrency checking becomes your concern. For years folks (especially those using Entity Framework) have been using the Unit of Work pattern to batch up multiple repository operations and submit them to the database as a single operation (EF-specific UoW implementation). Rob Conery suggests here that a better option is to use Command objects to encapsulate a multi-part operation that needs to be executed as a single transaction.
In any event, I would encourage you to keep the management of this operation within Product, so that consumers of Product are unaware of what's going on during the save - they just blissfully call product.SaveAsync() and they don't need to know whether that's causing one record update or ten. As long as Product is injected with the repositories it needs to get the job done, there's no need to have a separate domain service to coordinate this operation. There's nothing wrong with Product listening for events that its children raise and responding appropriately.
Hope this helps!
" I cannot allow eventual consistency when ProductDetails is deleted"
Why not? What would be the business cost of having Inventory.Product exist while Finance.Product doesn't or vice-versa?
"but then that accountant can step in and intependently change calculations for given product"
That's pretty much what eventual consistency is, no?
If you really can't have eventual consistency then use a domain service to create/delete two distinct aggregate roots in a single transaction, but ask yourself how you are going to do that if the information is not entirely provided by the same end user?
I agree with #plalx in almost every point. However I want to do my bit to the discussion.
I've found that there is usually a very little cost in creating two or more related aggregates inside a single transaction (inside a single bounded context). After all, if those aggregates don't exist yet there cannot be a concurrency conflict, there is no contention and no much difference. Furher, you don't need to deal with partially created state (thinking that state is split between aggregates). It is possible to do that using eventual consistency, and there are situations where that is a better approach, but most of the time there is no great benefit. Even Vernon in his book Implementing Domain-Driven Design mentions this use case as "valid reason to break the rules".
Deleting more than one aggregate is a different story. What should happen if you delete and aggregate that another user is updating at the same time? The probability of such a conflict increases as more aggregates you try to modify/delete in the same transaction. Is there always an upstream/downstream relationship between those aggregates? I mean, if an user deletes A and B must be also deleted, have the user that is updating B no "power" or "voice" to cancel that deletion since she is providing more information to the state of the aggregate?
Those are a very tricky questions and most of the time it is something you need to discuss with a domain expert, and there are very few real scenarios when the answer is something you can't afford with eventual consistency. I discovered that in many cases is preferable to put a "flag" marking the aggregate as "inactive", notifying that will be deleted after some period of time. If no user with enough permission request that aggregate to become active again, then it gets deleted. That helped users to not kill themselves when they delete some aggregate by mistake.
You've mentioned that you don't want a user to spend hours modifying one aggregate if there is a deletion, but that is something that a transaction doesn't contribute much. This is very dependent in the whole architecture, though. That user could have loaded the aggregate into her own memory space and then a deletion occurs. It doesn't matter if you delete inside a transaction, the user is still wasting time. A better solution could be to publish a domain event that triggers some sort of push notification to the user, so she knows that a deletion happened and can stop working (or request a cancellation of that deletion, if you follow such approach).
For the reports and calculations, there are many cases when those "scripts" can skip records where the sibling aggregate is gone, so users doesn't notice there is a missing part or there is no complete consistency yet.
If for some reason you still need to delete several aggregates in the same transaction you just start a transaction in an application service and use repositories to perform the deletion, analogous to the creation case.
So, to summarize:
The rule of "modify one aggregate per transaction" is not that important when there is a creation of aggregates.
Deletion of many aggregates works quite well (most of the time) with eventual consistency, and very often just disabling those aggregates, one at a time, is better than performing the deletion immediately.
Preventing an user from wasting time is better achieved with proper notifications than transactions.
If there is a real need to perform those actions inside a single transaction, then manage that transaction in the application an be explicit. Using a domain service to perform all the required operations (except for the transaction that is mostly an application concern) brings that logic back to the domain layer.
I'm new to CQRS and need advice on the following situation in my design. A command updates state of an aggregate A; the read model needs to be consequently updated with a result of a cross-aggregate calculation method; this method belongs to another aggregate B which holds a reference to the aggregate A; the method is a function of states of both aggregate B and the referenced aggregate A. Where is the correct place for this function to be called?
My considerations (can be skipped):
Command handler updating state of aggregate A could technically fetch aggregate B from the repository, call calculation on it and put result in the domain event; however I believe it's not command handler's job to fetch aggregates other than one being modified, even for reading purposes; also it's not command handler's job to perform calculations just to send with events rather than modify the state of domain.
The domain event ('Aggregate A updated') raised by the aggregate A contains only updated state of aggregate A, there's not enough info on state of aggregate B. Read model's event handler has no access to domain model, so it can neither fetch aggregate B nor call the desired function on aggregate B to update read model.
I know that any state needed by command which is external to the aggregate being modified must be passed along with the command. This way the application service, before sending the command, could fetch state of aggregate B (from read model), and put it in the command. For that I would have to move the function from aggregate B to some service and pass there states of both A and B. That would make aggregate B more anemic. Plus the above mentioned problem with doing calculations within command handler.
I've read people suggesting that any calculations that only read model is interested in belong to the read model itself. So the read model's handler of my event would just have at its disposal all needed state and behavior to perform calculations. However that would mean I have to duplicate much of the domain model concepts at the query side; it would be too complex to have a full-blown read model.
I've just thought of the following solution: within the domain, create a handler of the domain event 'Aggregate A updated'. It would fetch aggregate B, call the calculation method on it, then raise an 'Aggregate B function result changed' event with the new calculation result in it. Then the read model is able to take the result from this event and update itself. Would this be ok?
Note just in case that I'm not using Event Sourcing.
Any thoughts on this situation would be much appreciated. Thanks!
UPDATE: making the situation more concrete
My aggregates are Workers (Aggregate B) and Groups of workers (Aggregate B). Workers and Groups are a many-to-many relationship. Imagine both a Group and a Worker have some Value property. Worker's calculateValue() is a function of the Worker's Value plus Values of all Groups the Worker participates in. The Command described above is modifying Value for some Group. As a result, all Workers participating in the group would return different result of calculateValue().
What do I want from the read model? I want a list of Workers with calculated Values (that already account for Values from the Worker's all groups). I don't even need Group at the read side. If I go the 'do calculation on the read side' way, I need Groups as well as the whole structure of relationships there. I'm afraid it would be an unjustified complication.
Command handler updating state of aggregate A could technically fetch aggregate B from the repository, call calculation on it and put result in the domain event; however I believe it's not command handler's job to fetch aggregates other than one being modified, even for reading purposes; also it's not command handler's job to perform calculations just to send with events rather than modify the state of domain.
This is not OK because events should represent facts that happened in regard to a single Aggregate.
I know that any state needed by command which is external to the aggregate being modified must be passed along with the command. This way the application service, before sending the command, could fetch state of aggregate B (from read model), and put it in the command. For that I would have to move the function from aggregate B to some service and pass there states of both A and B. That would make aggregate B more anemic. Plus the above mentioned problem with doing calculations within command handler.
You should not send the Aggregate state in an event. In fact you should not query the Aggregate or use it't internal and private state in any other way but by the Aggregate itself. In CQRS the Aggregate is not to be queried. That's a read-model's purpose.
I've read people suggesting that any calculations that only read model is interested in belong to the read model itself. So the read model's handler of my event would just have at its disposal all needed state and behavior to perform calculations. However that would mean I have to duplicate much of the domain model concepts at the query side; it would be too complex to have a full-blown read model.
This is the way to go. However, what do you duplicate anyway? Is the result of that calculation used by the Aggregate to accept or reject any of its commands?
If yes, then it should be done inside the Aggregate, at command execution time and possible the final result sent along the event but only if the calculation can be done with the data from the command and/or the internal Aggregate's state and not by cross Aggregates state. If an Aggregate needs data from other Aggregates then that is a sign that your Aggregates boundaries might be wrong.
If not then the calculation should not stay inside the Aggregate, but only in the read-model.
In CQRS, by splitting the Write from the Read model you would split the calculations also to Write and to Read but there are some cases where a calculation is shared by the two models. In these cases you can extract the calculation inside a Class and use that Class in both the models.
I'm using a DDD/CQRS/ES approach and I have some questions about modeling my aggregate(s) and queries. As an example consider the following scenario:
A User can create a WorkItem, change its title and associate other users to it. A WorkItem has participants (associated users) and a participant can add Actions to a WorkItem. Participants can execute Actions.
Let's just assume that Users are already created and I only need userIds.
I have the following WorkItem commands:
CreateWorkItem
ChangeTitle
AddParticipant
AddAction
ExecuteAction
These commands must be idempotent, so I cant add twice the same user or action.
And the following query:
WorkItemDetails (all info for a work item)
Queries are updated by handlers that handle domain events raised by WorkItem aggregate(s) (after they're persisted in the EventStore). All these events contain the WorkItemId. I would like to be able to rebuild the queries on the fly, if needed, by loading all the relevant events and processing them in sequence. This is because my users usually won't access WorkItems created one year ago, so I don't need to have these queries processed. So when I fetch a query that doesn't exist, I could rebuild it and store it in a key/value store with a TTL.
Domain events have an aggregateId (used as the event streamId and shard key) and a sequenceId (used as the eventId within an event stream).
So my first attempt was to create a large Aggregate called WorkItem that had a collection of participants and a collection of actions. Participant and Actions are entities that live only within a WorkItem. A participant references a userId and an action references a participantId. They can have more information, but it's not relevant for this exercise. With this solution my large WorkItem aggregate can ensure that the commands are idempotent because I can validate that I don't add duplicate participants or actions, and if I want to rebuild the WorkItemDetails query, I just load/process all the events for a given WorkItemId.
This works fine because since I only have one aggregate, the WorkItemId can be the aggregateId, so when I rebuild the query I just load all events for a given WorkItemId.
However, this solution has the performance issues of a large Aggregate (why load all participants and actions to process a ChangeTitle command?).
So my next attempt is to have different aggregates, all with the same WorkItemId as a property but only the WorkItem aggregate has it as an aggregateId. This fixes the performance issues, I can update the query because all events contain the WorkItemId but now my problem is that I can't rebuild it from scratch because I don't know the aggregateIds for the other aggregates, so I can't load their event streams and process them. They have a WorkItemId property but that's not their real aggregateId. Also I can't guarantee that I process events sequentially, because each aggregate will have its own event stream, but I'm not sure if that's a real problem.
Another solution I can think of is to have a dedicated event stream to consolidate all WorkItem events raised by the multiple aggregates. So I could have event handlers that simply append the events fired by the Participant and Actions to an event stream whose id would be something like "{workItemId}:allevents". This would be used only to rebuild the WorkItemDetails query. This sounds like an hack.. basically I'm creating an "aggregate" that has no business operations.
What other solutions do I have? Is it uncommon to rebuild queries on the fly? Can it be done when events for multiple aggregates (multiple event streams) are used to build the same query? I've searched for this scenario and haven't found anything useful. I feel like I'm missing something that should be very obvious, but I haven't figured what.
Any help on this is very much appreciated.
Thanks
I don't think you should design your aggregates with querying concerns in mind. The Read side is here for that.
On the domain side, focus on consistency concerns (how small can the aggregate be and the domain still remain consistent in a single transaction), concurrency (how big can it be and not suffer concurrent access problems / race conditions ?) and performance (would we load thousands of objects in memory just to perform a simple command ? -- exactly what you were asking).
I don't see anything wrong with on-demand read models. It's basically the same as reading from a live stream, except you re-create the stream when you need it. However, this might be quite a lot of work for not an extraordinary gain, because most of the time, entities are queried just after they are modified. If on-demand becomes "basically every time the entity changes", you might as well subscribe to live changes. As for "old" views, the definition of "old" is that they are not modified any more, so they don't need to be recalculated anyways, regardless of if you have an on-demand or continuous system.
If you go the multiple small aggregates route and your Read Model needs information from several sources to update itself, you have a couple of options :
Enrich emitted events with additional data
Read from multiple event streams and consolidate their data to build the read model. No magic here, the Read side needs to know which aggregates are involved in a particular projection. You could also query other Read Models if you know they are up-to-date and will give you just the data you need.
See CQRS events do not contain details needed for updating read model
I have a MongoDB database with 2 collections:
groups: { group_slug, members }
users: { id, display name, groups }
All changes to groups are done by changing the members array of the group to include the users ids.
I want to sync these changes across to the users collection by using map/reduce. How can I output the results of map/reduce into an existing collection (but not merging or reducing).
My existing code is here: https://gist.github.com/morgante/5430907
How can I output the results of map/reduce into an existing collection
You really can't do it this way. Nor is this really suggested behaviour. There are other solutions:
Solution #1:
Output the map / reduce into a temporary collection
Run a follow-up task that updates the primary data store from the temporary collection
Clean-up the temporary collection
Honestly, this is a safe way to do this. You can implement some basic retry logic in the whole loop.
Solution #2:
Put the change on a Queue. (i.e. "user subscribes to group")
Update both tables from separates workers that are listening for such events on the queue.
This solution may require a separate piece (the queue), but any large system is going to have such denormalization problems. So this will not be the only place you see this.
In DDD, an aggregate root can have a repository. Let us take an Order aggregate and it's non-persistant counterpart OrderRepository and persistent counterpart OrderUoW. We have also ProductVariant aggregate which tracks the inventory of the products in the order. It can have a ProductVariantRepository and ProductVariantUoW.
The way the Order and the ProductVariant work is that before the order is persisted, the inventory is checked. If there is inventory, the order will be persisted by calling OrderUoW.Commit(). Yes, the ProductVariantUoW.Commit() will be called next to update the inventory of the products.
UNFORTUNATELY things can go bad, a user bought the same products in that short time (Consider this as a web app where two users are buying the same products). Now the whole transaction for the second user should fail by reverting the order that just created. Should I call the OrderUoW to rollback the changes (the order should be deleted from the db)? Or should I put both UoW.Commit() operations in a transaction scope, so failing of one commit() will rollback the changes? Or both the repositories (Order, ProductVariant) should have only UoW and it needs to have only one transaction scope?
I may be able to make the story short by saying, how the transaction is handled where there are multiple repositories involved?
A question we could ask is who is doing the following:
The way the Order and the ProductVariant work is that before the order
is persisted, the inventory is checked. If there is inventory, the
order will be persisted by calling OrderUoW.Commit(). Yes, the
ProductVariantUoW.Commit() will be called next to update the inventory
of the products.
Some argue that this kind of work belongs in the service layer, which allows the service layer to put things crossing aggregate objects into a single transaction.
According to http://www.infoq.com/articles/ddd-in-practice:
Some developers prefer managing the transactions in the DAO classes
which is a poor design. This results in too fine-grained transaction
control which doesn't give the flexibility of managing the use cases
where the transactions span multiple domain objects. Service classes
should handle transactions; this way even if the transaction spans
multiple domain objects, the service class can manage the transaction
since in most of the use cases the Service class handles the control
flow.
I think as an alternative to using a single transaction, you can claim the inventory using ProductVariant, and, if all the inventory items necessary are available then you can commit the order. Otherwise (i.e. you can't claim all the products you need for the order) you have to return the inventory that was successfully claimed using compensating transactions. The results it that in the case of unsuccessfull commit of an order, some of the inventory will temporarily appear unavailable for other orders, but the advantage is that you can work without a distributed transaction.
None the less, this logic still belongs in the service layer, not the DAO classes.
The way you are using unit of work seems a bit fine-grained. Just in case you haven't read Martin Fowler's take: http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/unitOfWork.html
That being said you want to handle the transaction at the use-case level. The fact that the inventory is checked up-front is simply a convenience (UX) and the stock level should be checked when persisting the various bits also. An exception can be raised for insufficient stock.
The transaction isolation level should be set such that the two 'simultaneous' parts are performed serially. So whichever one gets to update the stock levels first is going to 'win'. The second will then raise the exception.
If you can use a single UoW then do so, because it's easier.
If your repositories are on different DBs (or maybe one is file-based and the others are not) then you may be forced to use multiple UoWs, but then you're writing roll-back commands too, because if UoW1 saves changes to SqlRepo OK, but then UoW2 fails to save changes to FileRepo then you need to rollback SqlRepo. Don't bother writing all that rollback command stuff if you can avoid it!