Assume I have the relationship where every customer has an address (which in this case, is an entity), like below:
Customer{ Id, Name, MyAddress (instance of Address) }
Should I be allowing a structure that exposes the following option:
MyCustomer.MyAddress.Street = "Pine Street";
CustomerRepository.Save(MyCustomer);
Should this cascade a save, both for the Customer class and for the Address class? Or, is it better to perform the following:
MyCustomer.MyAddress.Street = "Pine Street";
AddressRepository.Save(MyCustomer.MyAddress);
Unfortunately, Address really is a value object, but I cannot make it interchangable like DDD requires as the Id tag is present; for example, if I did the following:
Customer1.setAddress(Customer2.getAddress());
Both Customer1 and Customer2 now have the same binding to the same record, which is dangerous.
None of your samples is DDD. Each one is simple CRUD.
Don't "set fields". Do meaningful operations.
customer.MoveTo(new Address(...))
customer.FixAddressTypo(new Address(...))
Repositories are for aggregates, not any entities. Identify your aggregates. http://dddcommunity.org/library/vernon_2011/
Why not map the Addres value Object as a bunch of fields in the Cutomers table? You don't need separate table just because you have a separate class.
Value objects should be immutable.
Related
I am making a class diagram for Class/Course Registration where students have to first register their course then select their class schedules (timetable)
I am unsure if I can have CourseRegistration and ClassRegistration table like that. The reason why I made it like that is, a student can register for a course but doesnt register to a class directly. so they can wait few days and then only register. So I have to make sure the course registration is saved in the database.
Thank you for all the help
PS: pls don't mind my attributes, they're just a draft.
Your business logic for the registration process (register both for a course and a corresponding class) is too complicated. Normally, one would only register for a class, which would then imply taking the corresponding course.
Also, what does "ClassSchedule" stand for? Is an instance of a "ClassSchedule" a class meeting?
Since your model is supposed to define a design (of database tables and of, e.g., Java classes), each entity class should have an ID attribute defined, which is expressed in UML with the keyword "id" in curly braces appended to the attribute declaration. Having "ID" in the attribute names is not a formal declaration. Also, an ID attribute seems to be missing for ClassSchedule.
Yes, that's fine this way. You could alternatively use the association class notation like this:
Some side notes:
labeling associations is not that helpful except you are on a business level analysis. Rather use role names on either end where appropriate.
Edit I somehow overlooked that you're designing tables. So my previous comment
remove all the id attributes. Each object will have its unique id assigned by the runtime system. Use such an id only if it's of public meaning (e.g. a passport id or a student's registration number). And then use that specific name (e.g. passportId) rather than a <class>id.
goes just for basic class design. If you already have a (derived) table design you can just go with those ids.
Regarding below excerpt, concerning cqrs and ddd, from Patterns, Principles, and Practices of Domain-Driven Design by Nick Tune, Scott Millett
Does it mean that domain model on command side can omit most of business attributes ?
How would it look like for eg Customer Entity?
Could Customer entity omit FirstName, Surname etc?
If so, where would these business attributes be? Only in read model in CustomerEntity?
Or maybe apart from CustomerEntity containing all business attributes there would also be CustomerAggregate wrapping CustomerEntity with 1:1 relation, and command object would operate on CustomerAggregate? (seems strange to me).
What does it mean "Customer entity desn't make sense"?
The text you pointed means that you do not have to model a reusable Entity for your whole system or even for your whole bounded context (Do not model reusable real life things). Doing this is a bad design.
You have to model an Aggregate that performs an action. You feed the Aggregate with only, and just only, the data needed to perform that action and the aggregate response, the changes the domain suffered, is what you have to persist.
Why Entities and V.O.'s then?
To model consistency, encapsulation and decoupling is the basic part but these are implementation details. For DDD what matters is that are different roles (or concepts).
When feeding the aggregate (constructor, function call parameters, etc) the aggregate has to know if it is working with entities and/or with V.O. to build its response.
If the domain action means a change in an attribute of a entity (something with unique identification in your whole system) the response of the aggregate (once all rules and invariants has been checked) should include the new attribute value and the identification of that entity that allows persist the changes.
So, by default, every aggregate has its own entity with the unique identification and the attributes needed for the aggregate action.
One aggregate could have a Customer entity with ID and its Name.
Another aggregate could have a Customer entity with ID and its Karma points.
So every aggregate has its own inner Customer entity to work with. When you feed an aggregate you pass Customer data (i.e. ID and name or ID and Karma points) and the aggregate treats that info as a entity (It is a matter of implementation details if there is a struct, class, etc internally to the aggregate to represent the entity).
One important thing: If you just need to deal with entities ID's then treat it as a V.O. (CustomerIdentityVO) because the ID is immutable and, probably, in that action you just need to write this CustomerIdentityVO in some field in persistence, not change any Customer attribute.
This is the standard vision. Once you start to identify common structures relevant to several aggregates or one aggregate that can perform several actions with the same data fed you start to refactoring, reusing, etc. It just a matter of good OOP design and SOLID principles.
Please, note that I am trying to be higly above of implementation details. I know that you almost always will have unwanted artifacts that depends of programing paradigm type, chosen programing language, etc. but this approach helps a lot avoiding the worse artifact you could have.
Recommended readings:
http://blog.sapiensworks.com/post/2016/07/29/DDD-Entities-Value-Objects-Explained
http://blog.sapiensworks.com/post/2016/07/14/DDD-Aggregate-Decoded-1
http://blog.sapiensworks.com/post/2016/07/14/DDD-Aggregate-Decoded-2
https://blog.sapiensworks.com/post/2016/07/14/DDD-Aggregate-Decoded-3
and
https://blog.sapiensworks.com/post/2016/08/19/DDD-Application-Services-Explained
for a complete puzzle vision.
If you are using Event Sourcing then it's true that you can model aggregates without adding attributes that they don't need for implementing the business logic.
Here's an example:
class Customer {
public Guid ID { get; private set; }
public Customer(Guid id, firstName, lastName, ...) {
ID = id;
this.AddEvent(new CustomerCreatedEvent(id, firstName, ....);
}
public void ChangeName(firstName, lastName) {
this.AddEvent(new CustomerRenamedEvent(this.ID, firstName, lastName),
}
}
Custom only has ID attribute because it needs it to add it to every event that it generates. FirstName and LastName are omitted as they are not needed even when ChangeName method is called. It only records an event that this happened. If your logic requires the FirstName then you can add it. You can omit any properties that you don't need.
Your Repository in this case will save only the events and won't care about the values of the attributes of the Customer.
On the Read side you will probably need these properties as you will display them to your users.
If your aggregates are not event sourced, then you probably will need more attributes on your aggregate to implement it's logic and they will be saved to the database.
Here's an example:
class Customer {
public Guid ID { get; private set; }
public string FirstName { get; private set; }
public string LastName { get; private set; }
public void ChangeName(firstName, lastName) {
FirstName = firstName;
LastName = lastName;
}
}
In this case your Repository will need these properties as it will generate a query to update the database with the new values.
Not sure what "Customer entity doesn't make sense" means.
Is there any way to get the name of a relationship given the from and to entities?
I have a fairly dynamic piece of code that needs to Associate or Disassociate entities. In order to call these functions, I need to know the name of the relationship. I am not sure how to determine the relationship name just given the two entities.
For example, my code might need to disassociate an account with a contact. How can I determine the relationship name of "account_primary_contact"?
In the interest of answering the question despite my not understanding why you would want to do this:
foreach (OneToManyRelationshipMetadata relationshipMetaData in primaryEntityMetadata.ManyToOneRelationships)
{
if (relationshipMetaData.ReferencingEntity == relatedEntity.LogicalName)
{
string relationshipName = relationshipMetaData.SchemaName;
//Do something with your relationship?
}
}
Where primaryEntityMetadata is of type EntityMetadata and ReferencingEntity is of type Entity. Then use similar logic for checking Many to One relationships.
This is a long question so i am gonna go straight to the point. This is pseudo code for better illustration of the problem
DB Structure
User (UserID, Name, LastName)
Address(AddressID, UserID, Street, City, State, ZipCode) =>Many to One User relationship
Phone (PhoneID, UserID, Number, IsPrimary) =>Many to One User relationship
Domain Classes
class User:IEntity
{
public string Name {get;set;}
public string LastName {get;set;}
public ContactInfo{get;set;}
}
class Phone: IValueObject or IEntity? will see later.
{
public int id; // persistence ID, not domain ID
public string Number {get;set;}
}
class Address: IValueObject or IEntity? will see later.
{
public string Line1 {get;set;}
public string City {get;set;}
public string State {get;set;}
public string ZipCode {get;set;}
}
class ContactInfo: IValueObject or IEntity? will see later.
{
List<Address> Addresses {get;set;}
List<Phone> PhoneNumbers {get;set;}
}
So, so far we have a very basic representation of this domain and its models.
My question is the following. Let's say that i want to Update one of the addreses or fix the area code for one of the numbers because of misspelling wnen it was initially typed in.
If i follow Evan's bible about DDD, Value Objects should be immutable. Meaning, no changes to its properties or fields after it was created.
If that's the case, then i guess, none of my classes are a ValueObject, since i can't just recreate the whole ContactInfo class just because one portion of the string in the phone number is wrong. So, i guess that makes all my classes Entities?
Keep in mind that i have a "persistence id" for each of this classes since they are stored in a database.
Let's say that i decide to make Phone a value object, since it's easy to recreate in the constructor
public Phone(string newNumber)
so, it would be something like adding a method to User (agg root) AND contactinfo? (Demeter Law)
like...
User....
public void UpdatePrimaryPhoneNumber(string number)
{
this.ContactInfo.UpdatePrimaryPhoneNumber(number);
}
ContactInfo....
public void UpdatePrimaryPhoneNumber(string number)
{
var oldPhone = Phones.Where(p=>p.IsPrimary).Single();
var newPhone = new Phone(number, oldPhone.persistenceid???-> this is not part of the domain)
oldPhone = newPhone;
}
but i still have to deal with persistence id... grrrrr. what a headache.
Sometimes i feel when i read those blogs that most "ddd experts" that value objects are overused or i would say misused.
What would be the best solution to this scenario?
Thank you
If i follow Evan's bible about DDD, Value Objects should be immutable.
Meaning, no changes to its properties or fields after it was created.
If that's the case, then i guess, none of my classes are a
ValueObject, since i can't just recreate the whole ContactInfo class
just because one portion of the string in the phone number is wrong.
So, i guess that makes all my classes Entities?
While the VO itself may be immutable, a VO doesn't exist on its own - it is always part of an aggregate. Therefore, a VO can be immutable, but the object which references that VO doesn't have to be. What helped me understand VOs is to compare them to something like a primitive Int32 value. The value of each individual integer is immutable - a 5 is always a 5. But anywhere you have an Int32 you can set another value there.
For you domain, what that means is that you can have an immutable address VO, but a given use entity can reference any instance of an address VO. This is what will allow corrections and any other changes to be made. You don't change the individual fields on the address VO - you replace it with a whole new VO instance.
Next, "Persistence ids" shouldn't be expressed in anywhere in domain code. They exist solely to satisfy the needs of the relational databases and NoSQL databases don't require them at all.
The primary phone scenario should look more like this:
public void UpdatePrimaryPhoneNumber(string number)
{
var existingPrimaryNumber = this.Phones.FirstOrDefault(x => x.IsPrimary == true);
if (existingPrimaryNumber != null)
this.Phones.Remove(existingPrimaryNumber);
this.Phones.Add(new Phone(phoneNumber: number, isPrimary = true));
}
This method encapsulates the idea of updating an existing primary phone number. The fact that phone number VOs are immutable means that you have to remove an existing value and replace it with a new one. What usually happens on the database end, especially with ORMs like NHibernate, is it will issue a SQL delete and a subsequent insert to effectively replace all phone numbers. This is OK since the ID of the VOs doesn't matter.
An Entity has a rather unique and individual life-cycle. It has meaning when it stands alone.
The classic example of Order/OrderItem may help with this.
If an OrderItem becomes an Entity it would have a life-cycle of its own. However, this doesn't make too much sense since it is part of an Order. This always seems obvious when looking at an order but less so when looking at your own classes because there can be some references between classes. For instance, an OrderItem represents some Product that we are selling. A Product has a life-cycle of its own. We can have an independent list of Products. How we model the link between an OrderItem and the Product is probably another discussion but I would denormalize the Product data I require into the OrderItem and store the original Product.Id also.
So is the Address class an Entity or a Value Object? This is always an interesting one in that we have that favourite of answers: it depends.
It will be context-specific. But ask yourself whether you have (or need) an independent list of Addresss and then only have a need for the link to that Address in your User. If this is the case then it is an Entity. If, however, your Address makes sense only when it is part of your User then it is a Value Object.
The fact that a Value Object is immutable does not mean you need to replace more than just the specific Value Object. I don't know if I would have a ContactInfo class in your current design since it only wraps the two collections (Address/PhoneNumber) but I would keep it if there is more to it (probably is). So simply replace the relevant PhoneNumber. If you have something like primary/secondary then it is as simple as:
AR.ReplacePrimaryPhoneNumber(new PhoneNumber('...'))
If it is a list of arbitrary numbers then a Remove/Add would be appropriate.
Now for the persistence Id. You do not need one. When you have a primary/secondary scenario you know what your use case is and you can execute the relevant queries in your DB (to update the primary PhoneNumber, for instance). If you have an arbitrary list you may go for add all new numbers in my list and delete those numbers from the DB not in my list; else just delete all the numbers and add everything you have. If this seems like a lot of heavy movement: it is. Event sourcing would move a lot of this to in-memory processing and it is something I will be pushing for seriously going forward.
I hope this all makes sense. Getting away from focusing on the data side of things is rather difficult but necessary. Focus on the domain as though you have no database. When you find friction then do your utmost to not pull database thinking into your domain but try to think about ways you could keep your domain clean and still use your DB of choice.
I would create a class PhoneNumber which contains the String number of the current Phone class and use that as a Value object within your Phone class:
class Phone implements IEntity
{
public int id; // persistence ID, not domain ID
public PhoneNumber number {get;set;}
}
class PhoneNumber implements IValueObject
{
public String number {get;set;};
}
Later when your code evolves you will need (for example) phone number validation and you can put it in the PhoneNumber class. This class can then be reused over the whole application at different places.
The Address is in my opinion a Value object which you can treat like a whole. Although you could model Street, City, etc... which are normally entities, but this is probably over-modelling. No part of the address can change, the whole object is always replaced when changing after initial creation.
The User class is within this example with these boundaries an Aggregate root (and thus also an Entity).
The ContactInfo class is not a ValueObject (not immutable) and not an Entity (no real identity) but an Aggregate. It contains multiple classes which should be seen as a whole.
More info on http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DDD_Aggregate.html
Usually whenever a persistence id is there you should be thinking of an Entity.
If however you would want to add the persistence id's, I would start splitting like the Phone and PhoneNumber class. For example Address (Entity containing id) and AddressValue containing all the other fields (and logic about address values).
This should also solve the headache about managing the persistence identities, since you replace the whole value object and the persistence identity stays the same in case of the updatePrimaryPhoneNumber.
I am trying to do exactly same thing as post in NSFetchResultsController + sectionNameKeyPath + section order, i.e. basically use 2 tables, let's say Categories <-->> Events. Category table consists of category field only, while Event consists of name, dateTimestamp.
I defined relationship 'category' in Events table and try to use that relationship as sectionNameKeyPath when creating fetchedResultsController:
NSFetchedResultsController *aFetchedResultsController = [[NSFetchedResultsController alloc] initWithFetchRequest:fetchRequest managedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext sectionNameKeyPath:#"category.category" cacheName:#"Root"];
Finally, I pre-populated Category table with some categories upon loading of the app (and verified with .dump that table is populated correctly)
Yet, I simulator fails on:
return [[self.fetchedResultsController sections] count];
I did extensive search and most people either suggest using one of the fields in the table as sectionNameKeyPath (this works!) or transient property (works too!) However, I just want to use relationship as it seems very logical to me in this case where events belong to some categories and there could be categories without events. Am I wrong in my assumption that relationship can be used as sectionNameKeyPath? The original link at the top of the question suggests it works, but guy does not know why or how. Documentation is very weak on what can be used as sectionNameKeyPath, so any help will be highly appreciated.
A relationship gets you a pointer to a managed object. It seems logical, though, that the sectionNameKeyPath parameter should be a key path that leads to a string, since NSFetchedResultsSectionInfo's name property is a string. The fetched results controller will follow that key path for each fetched object and group the objects into sections based on what they return for that key path, and it'll also use those strings as the names of their respective sections. You can't use a managed object for the name -- you have to use some string property of the managed object.
So, your Category entity must have an attribute that distinguishes one category from another, right? Use that as the key path and (as you've seen) everything will work out.
BTW, I think it's useful to try to get out of the database (rows/fields) mindset and try to think in object-oriented terms like entity and attribute. A big selling point of Core Data is that it provides an abstraction layer that hides the storage mechanism. Thinking in terms of tables is like thinking about blocks and sectors when you're reading or writing a file.
Caleb, thank you for your answer. I do believe my understanding was wrong to some degree. What I had was an entity Category and entity Event. Category has a string field 'category', thus 'category.category' path (first 'category' is relationship in the Event entity)
What I did not take in account, though, is that if there are no events, fetchresultscontroller cannot fetch anything (similar to 'left join')
What I wanted is to show categories even if there are no events. Relationship 'category' will not return anything in this case as there is nothing to return/sort/categorize.
What I had to do (wrong or right - not sure yet) is to treat [managed] object created from Category entity as a separate object in case there are no events and place in the table. When there is one event per category, I can switch to the original method of [automatic] showing events sorted by categories.
This is interesting issue of starting point (empty entities with relationships) where I feel core data is more confusing than traditional relationship database. I also believe that's why all books/articles/reports carefully stay away from this topic. In other words, I could not find analog of "left join" in core data. May be I am wrong because I am relatively new to all this. Below is the description of the entities:
Category <-->> Event
Category - parent
Category.category - attribute of type String
Category.event - relationship to Event entity
Event - child
Event.name - attribute of type String
Event.category - relationship to Category entity
Each event belongs to one category. Category may have multiple events.
Categories should be shown even if there are no events for this category.
I was trying to put Events under fetchresultscontroller. May be I should switch to Category first and then calculate cell based on category.event relationship, not the other way around - did not try that yet.