Servicestack - Grouping like services together - servicestack

Question

Was wondering if there's a recommended best-practice way of grouping similar services together in what's becoming a larger and larger project. Say that most of my services can be lumped in either dealing with "Pro" data or "Amateur" data (the data goes way beyond a simple flag in a table, the data itself is totally different, from different tables, on the pro or amateur side.
I know I can add routes to my classes...
/pro/service1
/am/service2
It looks like I can put the DTOs in namespaces....
What about the Service.Interface items (Service and Factory classes). Would you put those into namespaces also?
Finally, is there a way for the metadata page to reflect these groupings? I started to go down this road, but all the services listed out in alphabetical order, and you couldn't see the route or namespace differences between service1 and service2.
thank you

Answer 1

If you want, you can split multiple Service implementations across multiple dlls as described on the Modularizing Services wiki.
You can safely group service implementation classes into any nested folder groupings without having any impact to the external services. But changing the namespaces on DTO's can have an effect if your DTO's make use of object, interfaces or abstract classes which emit type info containing full namespaces.
In ServiceStack v4.09+ (now on MyGet) the MetadataFeature includes the ability to customize the ordering of the metadata page, e.g you can reverse the order of the metadata pages with:
var metadata = (MetadataFeature)Plugins.First(x => x is MetadataFeature);
metadata.IndexPageFilter = page => {
page.OperationNames.Sort((x,y) => y.CompareTo(x));
};

Answer 2

Organising your large project:
For a complex service(s) I setup 4 projects in one solution.
AppHost, This takes care of the configuration of the service. (References Model, Service and Types)
Model, This is the database model (Does not reference other projects)
Service, This is the implementation of the service only, not the interfaces or DTOs (References Model and Types)
Types, This includes my Interfaces, DTOs and routes. (Does not reference other projects)
Having a separate Types library allows the distribution to clients, for example for use with the ServiceStack JsonServiceClient.
Yes you can namespace the Interfaces, DTOs and factory classes, any way you want. They will work as long as they are referenced in your service correctly.
If you are trying to separate more than one service, you should consider separating your service code into logical folders within the Service project. i.e.
/Service/Pro
/Service/Amateur
Wrap the outer code of your Service methods in a public partial static class MyServiceStackApplication, with an appropriate name. Then reference this as the assembly in the AppHost constructor. So for example:
Pro Service (Service Project/Pro/UserActions.cs)
public partial static class MyServiceStackApplication
{
public partial class Pro
{
public class UserActionsService : Service
{
public User Get(GetUserRequest request)
{
}
}
// ...
}
}
Pro Service (Service Project/Pro/OtherActions.cs)
public partial static class MyServiceStackApplication
{
public partial class Pro
{
public class OtherActionsService : Service
{
public Other Get(GetOtherRequest request)
{
}
}
// ...
}
}
Amateur Service (Service Project/Am/UserActions.cs)
public partial static class MyServiceStackApplication
{
public partial class Amateur
{
public class UserActionsService : Service
{
public User Get(GetUserRequest request)
{
}
}
// ...
}
}
etc.
You can see from the above code we can have multiple files, all separated out and organised, but one assembly for ServiceStack to reference in the AppHost:
public AppHost() : base("Pro & Amateur Services", typeof(MyServiceStackApplication).Assembly) {}
Using the reference to the MyServiceStackApplication assembly, and using the partial keyword allows you to organise the code into manageable groupings.
Metadata:
Unfortunately separating the metadata by namespace isn't supported. You could try and customize the MetaDataFeature yourself, but it does seem like a useful feature, being able to separate multiple services where they are hosted in the one ServiceStack application. I would suggest you raise a feature request.
Mythz is bringing out features faster than lightning. :) Seems like he has that covered in the next release and you should be able to apply a custom filter to HostContext.Metadata.OperationNamesMap.