This is only an example.
Say that you have 2 entities for 2 different context boundaries. The first context is the SkillContexter, the entity is 'Player' and has 3 properties: Id, Name and SkillLevel. In the other context (Contactcontext) the entity is 'Player' and has 3 properties: Id, Name and EMail.
How do I persist these entities to the database? I only want one table (Player) and not two tables (PlayerContact, PlayerSkill). Shall I have two different repositories for player that save the different context-entities, but into same table? Or shall I have a "master" player entity that holds all properties that I need to save, so that I create a new entity called PlayerMaster that has 4 properties: Id, Name, EMail and SkillLevel?
The first solution gives me more repositories, and the second makes me make a "technical" entity that only purpose is to save data to a database, and that feels really wrong, or is there a better solution that I have missed?
How have you guys solved it?
When I first started with DDD, I also wrestled with the Context + Domain + Module + Model organization of things as well.
DDD is really meant to be a guide to building your domain models. Once I stopped trying to sub-organize my Contexts and boundies, and started thinking of what really is shared between entities - things started to fit together better.
I actually do not use contexts, unless it is a completely different application (app = context). Just my preference. But, I do have Modules that only share base abstracts and interfaces common throughout code (IRepository, IComponent, etc). The catch is, DDD says that Modules can share entities between modules - but, only on a very limited scale (you really don't want to do it often).
With that in mind, I would get away from using contexts and move to a "what really am I trying to accomplish, what do these models have in common). Here's what I would think, reading your question (if I understand them).
Person() is a base entity. It has ID and Name.
PlayerSkill() is a Value Object, that is
accessable from Person().PlayerSkill.
Contact() is an entity that inherits Person(),
so it inherits ID and Name, and has additional Contact properties you want.
Now, I just tore up your domain. I know.
You can use a hybird approach as well:
Person() is a base entity. It has ID and Name.
Player() inherits Person(), applies Skill()
and other VOs.
Contact() inherits Person(), applies Address()
and other VOs.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by context boundaries, so my answer may be off.
Do the two Player entities represent the same physical entity (person)? If so, then I would create a single Player entity with all four attributes and store their data in a single table.
Related
If have the following Code.
public class CountryFactory : IEntityFactory
{
private readonly IRepository<Country> countryRepository;
public CountryFactory(IRepository<Country> countryRepository)
{
this.countryRepository = countryRepository;
}
public Country CreateCountry(string name)
{
if (countryRepository.FindAll().Any(c => c.Name == name))
{
throw new ArgumentException("There is already a country with that name!");
}
return new Country(name);
}
}
From a DDD approach, is the the correct way to create a Country. Or is it better to have a CountryService which checks whether or not a country exists, then if it does not, just call the factory to return a new entity. This will then mean that the service will be responsible of persisting the Entity rather than the Factory.
I'm a bit confused as to where the responsibility should lay. Especially if more complex entities needs to be created which is not as simple as creating a country.
In DDD factories are used to encapsulate complex objects and aggregates creation. Usually, factories are not implemented as separate classes but rather static methods on the aggregate root class that returns the new aggregate.
Factory methods are better suited than constructors since you might need to have technical constructors for serialization purposes and var x = new Country(name) has very little meaning inside your Ubiquitous Language. What does it mean? Why do you need a name when you create a country? Do you really create countries, how often new countries appear, do you even need to model this process? All these questions arise if you start thinking about your model and ubiquitous language besides tactical pattern.
Factories must return valid objects (i.e. aggregates), checking all invariants inside it, but not outside. Factory might receive services and repositories as parameters but this is also not very common. Normally, you have an application service or command handler that does some validations and then creates a new aggregate using the factory method and adds it to the repository.
There is also a good answer by Lev Gorodinski here Factory Pattern where should this live in DDD?
Besides, implementation of Factories is extensively described in Chapter 11 of the Red Book.
Injecting a Repository into a Factory is OK, but it shouldn't be your first concern. The starting point should be : what kind of consistency does your business domain require ?
By checking Country name uniqueness in CountryFactory which is part of your Domain layer, you give yourself the impression that the countries will always be consistent. But the only aggregate is Country and since there is no AllCountries aggregate to act as a consistency boundary, respect of this invariant will not be guaranteed. Somebody could always sneak in a new Country that has exactly the same name as the one being added, just after you checked it. What you could do is wrap the CreateCountry operation into a transaction that would lock the entire set of Countries (and thus the entire table if you use an RDBMS) but this would hurt concurrency.
There are other options to consider.
Why not leverage a database unique constraint to enforce the Country name invariant ? As a complement, you could also have another checkpoint at the UI level to warn the user that the country name they typed in is already taken. This would necessitate another "query" service that just calls CountryRepository.GetByName() but where the returned Countries are not expected to be modified.
Soon you'll be realizing that there are really two kinds of models - ones that can give you some domain data at a given moment in time so that you can display it on a user interface, and ones that expose operations (AddCountry) and will guarantee that domain invariants always hold. This is a first step towards CQRS.
What is the frequency of Countries being added or modified ? If it is that high, do we really need a Country name to be unique at all times ? Wouldn't it solve a lot of problems if we loosened up the constraints and allowed a user to temporarily create a duplicate Country name ? A mechanism could detect the duplicates later on and take a compensating action, putting the newly added Country on hold and reaching out to the user to ask them to change the name. A.k.a eventual consistency instead of immediate consistency.
Does Country need to be an Aggregate ? What would be the cost if it was a Value Object and duplicated in each entity where it is used ?
I´m a little confused about inheritance and relationships in core data, and I was hopping someone could drive to the right path. In my app i have created 3 entities, and none of them have (and are not suppose to have) common properties, but there´s gonna be a save and a load button for all the work that the user does. From my understanding I need to "wrap" all the entities "work" into an object which will be used to save and load, and my question is, do I need to create relationships between the entities? Because I have to relate them somehow and this is what make sense to me. Is my logic correct?
I'm implementing a budget calculator, and for the purpose of everyone understand what my issue is, I´m going to give an practical example and please correct me if my logic is incorrect:
Let´s just say you are a fruit seller, and because of that it´s normal to have a database of clients and also a fruit database with the kinds of fruit you sell. From my understanding I find two entities here:
Client with properties named: name, address, phone, email, etc.
Stock with properties named: name, weight, stock, cost, supplier, etc.
TheBudget with properties named: name, amount, type, cost, delivery, etc.
I didn´t put all the properties because I think you get the point. I mean as you can see, there´s only two properties I could inherit; the rest is different. So, if I was doing a budget for a client, I can have as many clients I want and also the amount of stock, but what about the actual budget?
I´m sorry if my explanation was not very clear, but if it was..what kind of relationships should I be creating? I think Client and TheBudget have a connection. What do you advise me?
That's not entirely correct, but some parts are on the right track. I've broken your question down into three parts: relationships, inheritance and the Managed Object Context to hopefully help you understand each part separately:
Relationships
Relationships are usually used to indicate that one entity can 'belong' to another (i.e. an employee can belong to a company). You can setup multiple one-to-many relationships (i.e. an employee belongs to a company and a boss) and you can setup the inverse relationships (which is better described with the word 'owns' or 'has', such as 'one company has many employees).
There are many even more complicated relationships depending on your needs and a whole set of delete rules that you can tell the system to follow when an entity in a relationship is deleted. When first starting out I found it easiest to stick with one-to-one and one-to-many relationships like I've described above.
Inheritance
Inheritance is best described as a sort of base template that is used for other, more specific entities. You are correct in stating that you could use inheritance as a sort of protocol to define some basic attributes that are common across a number of entities. A good example of this would be having a base class 'Employee' with attributes 'name', 'address' and 'start date'. You could then create other entities that inherit from this Employee entity, such as 'Marketing Rep', 'HR', 'Sales Rep', etc. which all have the common attributes 'name', 'address' and 'start date' without creating those attributes on each individual entity. Then, if you wanted to update your model and add, delete or modify a common attribute, you could do so on the parent entity and all of its children will inherit those changes automatically.
Managed Object Context (i.e. saving)
Now, onto the other part of your question/statement: wrapping all of your entities into an object which will be used to save and load. You do not need to create this object, core data uses the NSManagedObjectContext (MOC for short) specifically for this purpose. The MOC is tasked with keeping track of objects you create, delete and modify. In order to save your changes, you simply call the save: method on your MOC.
If you post your entities and what they do, I might be able to help make suggestions on ways to set it up in core data. You want to do your best to setup as robust a core data model as you can during the initial development process. The OS needs to be able to 'upgrade' the backing store to incorporate any changes you've made between your core data model revisions. If you do a poor job of setting up your core data model initially and release your code that way, it can be very difficult to try and make a complicated model update when the app is in the wild (as you've probably guessed, this is advice born out of painful experience :)
I need to clarify something.
Have Person Aggreagate , 2 VOs (Country, StateProvince).
I want to load all country in my presentation layer (i am using mvc)
Evan says you only use repository (IPersonRepository) to work with root entity (it should always return just a reference to the Aggregate Root)
public interface IPersonRepository()
{
void savePerson(Person p);
void removePerson(Person p);
Ilist<Person> getPerson();
}
what i usually do to solve this :
Add in IPersonRepository this method
IList<Country> LookupCountrysOfPerson();
In Infra layer implement the Domain interfaces like this:
public IList<Person> LookupCountrysOfPerson()
{
return Session.CreateQuery("from Countrys").List<Person>());
}
My partner says im wrong.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice your domain model in order to accomplish some task
What is the best way to do this?
with code please! :)
I would say it's unlikely that you need country to be an entity. I suspect that country is nothing more than reference data, much like a person's title would be. Is there any behavior associated to country in your domain? I suspect it's just what's printed onto letters/envelops.
This question is somewhat similar to this one which I answered a while back:
Simple aggregate root and repository question
My suggestion is that you implement a Lookup service that your client can make use of and which is cached. Ignore the rules of DDD and anything to do with aggregates or repositories for this. As someone else has mentioned, this is where CQRS's ideology comes into play; the client shouldn't have to go through the domain in order to get data. The domain is purely transactional, not designed for queries.
This article explains how to build a generic lookup service for reference data for things that typically fill dropdowns in the UI (i.e. Title, Country etc)
http://wtfperminute.blogspot.com/2011/02/working-with-reference-data-lookups.html
Evans also says (pg 170) "An entity as basic as Location may be used by many objects for many reasons..."
I would also consider making Country an entity for the reasons given above. Perhaps more importantly, it is a low level object. You probably are also even supplying Country by configuration rather than through any actual domain activities. Therefore I would remove it from the Person and make it a standalone entity.
Also for this type of object you may not really need a dedicated repository, consider creating a single lookup service that provides query access for a group of similar objects of this nature.
If in your domain country is actually a VO (you don't want to maintain a thread of identity in the country name was changed etc.) which is the most common scenario, I would add a specialized class in the data access layer to return a list of all countries as VOs. I would also add caching (2nd level cache in NHibernate) to the country entity and list all countries query so that I don't have to hit the DB each time.
Actually, this is where CQRS really shines. CQRS acknowledges that you don't have to go through the domain layer in order to get some data for presentation purposes. In CQRS you just grab some data.
It sounds like countries are not in fact value objects here; they have distinct identities and are important for business purposes outside of your Person objects. They should become entities, and be treated in the fashion appropriate to them.
Think of it this way: let's say some volatile country had their current dictator overthrown and got a name change. The Person object's reference to a Country should still be valid, because the Country is not defined by its attributes (i.e. the string denoting its name), but by its identity.
I am trying to draw a conceptual class diagram. In my system, I have one person who can be performing 2 roles. One being "teacher" and other being "student". The same person could be a teacher in one instance and the same person could be a student in another instance. In such a situation, is it good to depict them as 2 separate classes (in my conceptual diagram)?
Please advise.
Thanks
Unless the person is teaching themself, don't get caught up in trying to show relationships that cross a use-case boundary. Validate the links for each scenario separately; just realize that not all connections will be used for every scenario.
People fill roles. Try
Person associated with EducationRole
EducationRole has subclasses of 'Student' and 'Teacher'
Here is a diagram.
They can change the role they play depending on the situation. If you need to show a person teaching themself then create a subclass of EducationRole named 'Autodiadact' which just means self-teacher.
A commenter asked about changing the role using a method and I'd like to include the answer here.
So, yes you could code the ability to change the role in a method but back up and ask the bigger question, why are we changing the role? A teacher is becoming a student or a student is becoming a teacher, either way the model as shown allows a Person to have many EducationRoles (which is what the asterisk denotes) at the same time so there isn't really a need to change the role but support a person with multiple possible roles.
In the conceptual model you are attempting to illustrate relationships between any valid state of the system, not necessarily how the change might be executed (using a method).
I've got a data model where there is a Person entity, which has a transformable attribute which is an array of dictionaries containing information. The model is much bigger than that, this is just the part I'm having trouble with. It was designed this way by an old developer, and in taking over the project I need to migrate this to be 100% core data.
So what I need to do is create a new entity, then step through each dictionary in the Person's array and create new instances of that entity with the information from that dictionary. I thought I could use an NSEntityMigrationPolicy to set up a custom migration for this new Entity, but it seems the Core Data migration is expecting X number of source entities to translate to X number of destination entities. Because I technically have 0 source entities right now (because they're in an array that Core Data doesn't really know anything about), I'm not sure how I can make the migration create new entities during the process.
What, or rather where in the migration procedure, is the best way to do what I'm trying to accomplish? I've always used lightweight migration in the past, so this is my first adventure in custom migration.
It would help to have a sense of your data model (schema) - but let's assume that your Person entity now holds home address and list of favorite restaurants. And let's further assume that you will be creating new entities Address and Restaurant along with the following relationships:
Person has one Address, so there's a to-one relationship from Person to Address called "homeAddress". There's an inverse to-many relationship from Address to Person, because many people could live at the same address.
Person has a to-many relationship (called restaurants) to Restaurants. Restaurant could also has a to-many relationship to Person (though this might be one of those cases where bidirectionality doesn't really make sense).
Anyway, the point is that now - in addition to your PersonToPerson NSEntityMigrationPolicy subclass, you will also have PersonToAddress and PersonToRestaurant. These will be the places that you unpack the old data and use it to instantiate and initialize new Address and Restaurant objects.
Of course, there are lots of other complicating issues. For example, you won't want to be creating a new instance of the same Restaurant for every Person who likes it. You will need to keep track of newly created Restaurants.
You will want to order your mappings strategically - probably with PersonToPerson first.
You might want to look at Marcus Zarra's Core Data sample code and maybe even buy his book.