Decorating Repositories with AutoFac - domain-driven-design

Question

Hi I have a maybe a common problem that I think not entirely can be solved by Autofac or any IoC container. It can be a design problem that I need some fresh input on.
I have the classic MVC web solution with EF 6. Its been implemented in a true DDD style with Anti-corruption layer, three bounded contexts, cross-cutting concerns movers out to infrastructure projects. It has been a real pleasure to see all pieces fall in to place in good way. We also added Commands to CUD operations into Domain.
Now here is the problem. Customer want a change log that tracks every entities property and when updates are done we need to save into change log values before and after update. We have implemented that successful in a ILoggerService that wraps a Microsoft test utility that we uses to detect changes. But I, my role is Software Architect, took the decision to Decorate our generic repositories with a ChangeTrackerRepository that have a dependency on ILoggerService. This works fine. The Decorator track methods Add(…) and Modify(…) in our IRepository<TEntity>.
The problem is that we have Repositories that have custom repositories that have custom queries like this:
public class CounterPartRepository : Repository<CounterPart>, ICounterPartRepository
{
public CounterPartRepository(ManagementDbContext unitOfWork)
: base(unitOfWork)
{}
public CounterPart GetAggregate(Guid id)
{
return GetSet().CompleteAggregate().SingleOrDefault(s => s.Id == id);
}
public void DeleteCounterPartAddress(CounterPartAddress address)
{
RemoveChild(address);
}
public void DeleteCounterPartContact(CounterPartContact contact)
{
RemoveChild(contact);
}
}
We have simple repositories that just closes the generic repository and get proper EF Bounded context injected into it (Unit Of Work pattern):
public class AccrualPeriodTypeRepository : Repository<AccrualPeriodType>, IAccrualPeriodTypeRepository
{
public AccrualPeriodTypeRepository(ManagementDbContext unitOfWork)
: base(unitOfWork)
{
}
}
The problem is that when decorating AccrualPeriodTypeRepository with AutoFac through generic Decorator we can easily inject that repo into CommandHandler actor like this
public AddAccrualPeriodCommandHandler(IRepository<AccrualPeriod> accrualRepository)
This works fine.
But How do we also decorate CounterPartRepository???
I have gone through several solutions in my head and they all end up with a dead-end.
1) Manually decorate every custom repository generate to many custom decorators that it will be near unmaintainable.
2) Decorate the closed Repository Repository with extended custom queries. This smells bad. Should be part of that repository?
3) If we consider 2… maybe Skip our Services and only rely on IRepository for operating on our Aggregate Roots and IQueryHandler (see article https://cuttingedge.it/blogs/steven/pivot/entry.php?id=92)
I need some fresh input to a common problem I think, when it comes to decorating your repositories when you have custom closed repositories and simple repositories also closed but both inherit from same Repository

Answer 1

Have you consider decorating command handlers instead of decorating repositories?
Repos are too low level, and it is not their responsibility to know what should be logged and how.
What about the following:
1) You have your command handlers in a way:
public class DeleteCounterPartAddressHandler : IHandle<DeleteCounterPartAddressCommand>
{
//this might be set by a DI container, or passed to a constructor
public ICounterPartRepository Repository { get; set; }
public void Handle(DeleteCounterPartAddressCommand command)
{
var counterpart = repository.GetPropertyById(command.CounterPartId);
// in DDD you always want to read and aggregate
// and save an aggregate as a whole
property.DeleteAdress(command.AddressId);
repository.Save(counterpart)
}
}
2) Now you can simply use Chain Of Responsibility pattern to "decorate" your handlers with logging, transactions, whatever:
public class LoggingHandler<T> : IHandler<T> {
private readonly IHandler<T> _innerHandler;
public LoggingHandler(IHandler<T> innerHandler) {
_innerHandler = innerHandler;
}
public void Handle(T command)
{
//Obviously you do it properly, but you get the idea
_log.Info("Before");
_innerHandler.Handle(command);
_log.Info("After");
}
}
Now you have just one piece of code responsible for logging and you can compose it with any command handler, so if you ever want to log a particular command then you just "wrap" it with the logging handler, and it is still your IHandle<T> so the rest of the system is not impacted.
And you can do it with other concerns too (threading, queueing, transactions, multiplexing, routing, etc.) without messing around and plumbing this stuff here and there.
Concerns are very well separated this way.
It is also much better (to me) because you log on a real operation (business) level, rather than on low-level repository.
Hope it helps.
P.S. In DDD you really want your repositories to only expose aggregate-level methods because Aggregates suppose to take care of their invariants (and nothing else, no services, no repositories), and because Aggregate represents transaction boundary.
Really, it is up to the Repository how to get the Aggregate from persisted storage and how to persist it back, outside it should look like you ask someone for an object and it gives you an object you can call behaviors on.
So normally you would only get an aggregate from the repository, call its behavior(s) and then save it back. Which really means that your repositories would mostly have GetById and Save methods, not some internals like "UpdateThatPartOfAnAggregate".