Centeva.DomainModeling.EFCore 8.1.0

Centeva.DomainModeling

This package contains types (classes and interfaces) for building a rich domain layer for your application using some Domain Driven Design tactical patterns.

Built With

• .NET 6
• MediatR
• Ardalis.Specification
• AutoMapper

Technical Patterns

You can use these coding patterns as part of a Domain Driven Design approach to building your application. You don't have to be using DDD to benefit from these patterns, but they are intended to be used together.

To find out more about this approach, here are some resources:

• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans (book)
• Implementing Domain Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon (book)
• DDD Part 2: Tactical Domain-Driven Design (blog post)
• Centeva Web API Template (template project)

Entities

An Entity is a plain object for which its identity is important. This is implemented with a unique Id that is assigned when the entity is created and is not changed for the lifetime of the entity.

Two instances of an entity type that have the same Id should be considered to be equivalent.

An entity is mutable and its properties can be changed. However, it is preferrable to avoid having public setters for all of those properties. Instead you should use methods to update the entity's properties. This allows you to enforce invariants (validation rules) and to publish Domain Events when the entity is changed. Use additional measures such to protect an entity's invariants such as constructors, guard clauses, and read-only collections.

In most cases your project will involve persisting entities to some kind of data storage, such as a database. However, the details of such persistence should not be contained within the definitions of those entities. (Avoid things like Entity Framework annotation attributes like [Table].)

The BaseEntity class can be inherited for your project's entities.

• The Id property (your entity's unique identifier) has a public setter but try to avoid using it in application code, especially if your database is auto-generating values. However, it can be helpful when seeding data both in tests and in your application.

Value Objects

A Value Object represents something in your domain which determines its identity by its properties. Two value object instances are considered equal if their relevant properties are equal. Because of this, a value object is ideally immutable. For example, two Addresses are considered equal if they have the same street address, city, state, and zip code.

Value object classes can and should contain business logic, especially for ensuring valid properties.

Entities can (and should) contain value objects, but value objects should never contain entities.

Your value object classes should inherit from the ValueObject class to gain equality functionality.

See https://enterprisecraftsmanship.com/posts/value-objects-explained/ for more information about this concept.

Aggregates

An Aggregate is a collection of domain objects (Entities and Value Objects) that is treated as a single unit for manipulation and enforcement of invariants. An aggregate should adhere to the following rules:

• The aggregate is created, retrieved, and updated as a whole.
• The aggregate is always in a constistent and valid state.
• One of the entities in an aggregate is the main entity or "root" and holds references to the other ones.
• An aggregate should only reference the root of other aggregates.

You can use the IAggregateRoot interface to mark the roots of your aggregates. This is just a marker interface (no properties or methods) and it's up to you to enforce the Aggregate pattern. (See below for information about enforcing in your repositories.)

Domain Events

Domain Events describe things that happen in your domain model. They are typically used to publish information about changes to your entities. These events will be interest to other parts of your model, and can be handled to produce side effects, such as sending emails or updating other entities.

Each entity inheriting from BaseEntity contains a DomainEvents list which you can use for storing and later publishing Domain Events. You will use the IDomainEventDispatcher in your application to publish and handle these, likely inside of your Entity Framework DbContext or a domain service.

Repositories

Repository is a pattern used to control and constrain access to data. It defines standard CRUD operations on a set of entities of the same type. If you are implementing Aggregates, your repositories should only operate on the root of each Aggregate, as child entities should never be directly accessed.

Read-only operations are defined in IReadRepository while IRepository adds update operations to those. This not only better adheres to the Interface Segregation Principle, but allows implementers to add features such as caching that would only apply to read operations.

The package Centeva.DomainModeling.EFCore provides an abstract implementation of IRepository named BaseRepository. You can use it by creating a derived class in your project. Additionally, if you want to enforce that repositories can only access aggregate roots, then your derived class should look like this:

public class EfRepository<T> : BaseRepository<T>, IRepository<T> where T : class, IAggregateRoot
{
    public EfRepository(ApplicationDbContext dbContext)
      : base(dbContext) { }
}

If you are using the AutoMapper project feature, then derive your repository from the BaseProjectedRepository class like this:

public class EfRepository<T> : BaseProjectedRepository<T>, IRepository<T>, IProjectedReadRepository<T> where T : class, IAggregateRoot
{
    public EfRepository(ApplicationDbContext dbContext, IConfigurationProvider mappingConfigurationProvider)
      : base(dbContext, mappingConfigurationProvider) { }
}

Specifications

Specification is a pattern used to pull query logic out of other places in an application and into self-contained, shareable, testable classes. This eliminates the need to add custom query methods to your Repository, and avoids other anti-patterns such as leaked IQueryable objects.

See the documentation for the Ardalis.Specification library for more information and examples.

Domain Services

Domain Services are used to encapsulate domain logic that doesn't belong in an entity or value object. They are typically used to coordinate operations between multiple entities or aggregates. They are also useful for encapsulating domain logic that is not specific to a single entity or aggregate.

Domain Services can publish Domain Events. For example, a CustomerService might publish a CustomerDeletedEvent when a customer is deleted, since the Customer entity itself cannot publish an event when it is deleted.

There is no base implementation of a Domain Service in this library. You can create regular C# classes and interfaces for these when they have dependencies on other parts of your application, or use a static class and method for simpler cases.

Factories

Factories are used to encapsulate logic for creating new aggregates. They are useful when:

• Complex business logic is involved in creating an aggregate.
• You need to create an aggregate differently depending on the inputs.
• There is a large amount of input data.
• You need to create multiple aggregates at once.

There is no base implementation of a Factory in this library. You can create one via a static method on an aggregate class for simple cases, or with a separate factory class for more complex cases.

Getting Started

Add a reference to Centeva.DomainModeling in your project.

You should only need to reference this package from the lowest layer of your solution. If you are using multiple projects to separate Core/Domain, Application, and Web API layers (i.e., "Clean" or "Ports and Adapters" architecture) then reference from the Core project.

Using Entity Framework Core

Reference the Centeva.DomainModeling.EFCore package to get an implementation of the Repository pattern for this ORM. Reference this package from your Infrastructure project if your solution separates concerns by project.

This requires EF Core and MediatR to be added to your application's services configuration for dependency injection. See the documentation for these tools individually for instructions.

Using AutoMapper for Projection Support

You can use AutoMapper to provide projection support for your Repositories, which will allow you to map your entities to another type and only request the data you need from the database.

Import the Centeva.DomainModeling.EFCore.AutoMapper package, add AutoMapper to your application's services configuration for dependency injection, and derive your Repository classes from BaseProjectedRepository. See the AutoMapper documentation for information on dependency injection setup.

Running Tests

From Windows, use the dotnet test command, or your Visual Studio Test Explorer. Integration tests will use an in-memory SQLite database.

Deployment

Use dotnet pack to generate a NuGet package. This library is versioned by GitVersion. Create a Git tag for an official release (e.g., "v1.0.0").

Contributing

Please use a Pull Request to suggest changes to this library. You should not add any functionality or dependency that is not appropriate for use at the lowest level (the "domain" level) of an application.

Resources

Take a look at https://bitbucket.org/centeva/centeva.templates for more ideas on how to use this library in your application.