I have some trouble getting my head around how to implement more complex operations in a Domain Service in RIA Services. This is all Silverlight 4, VS 2010 and .Net Framework 4 in Beta 2.
Goal
I wish I could create an operation on my LinqToEntitiesDomainService that would have a signature something like this:
public UnwieldyOperationResult PerformUnwieldyOperation( UnwieldyOperationParameters p );
The idea is that this operation takes a colleciton of parameters and performs rather complex operations which would update different instances and types of the entities that are otherwise manipulated through the DomainService CRUD functionality.
Problem
The immediate problem i hit is that does not seem to be allowed to pass the custom type as parameter to the method, and I suppose something along those lines go for the return value. I want to encapsulate the operation parameters in a DTO for clarity, and this unwieldy operation does not have any corresponding entity in the legacy database that I have wrapped with Entity Framework 4.0 model, which I am in turn basing the Domain Service on.
Is a domain service supposed to deal with only the types that are entities in the underlying EF model? Is it not designed to expose more complex operations like my UnwieldyOperation?
If so, can I build another service somehow that allows both the operation signature and to manipulate the entity framework?
I have understood that only one Domain Service can handle an entity from the model. This has led me to cram all the CRUD and now also the UnwieldyOperation into one Domain Service, although my first idea was to split the service into smaller parts.
If I'd get the operation to work with parameters and return value in the Domain Service, my next wish would be to have the entities that are already loaded in the domain context at the client refresh themselves.
Is there any efficient mechanism for such a thing?
How would you go about to do that?
What I have so far...
In short, this is what I have so far:
I have wrapped an existing legacy database
with an Entity Framework 4.0 model with as
little extra padding/code as
possible. This means right-click, add and generate from database.
I have implemented the simpler CRUD operations in the DomainService and I am using them successfully to display and edit straight forward data. I have some encapsulation of logic through ViewModels in client but I expose the Entity classes directly, but I think this is unrelated to my problem/question.
I have realized that I can't add the UnwieldyOperation in an as straight forward manner as I initially thought... Also I suspect/hope that I have misunderstood some aspects of the Domain Service mechanism, which has led me to the current situation.
One way to go?
Writing this down in a question like this gives me the idea that perhaps I'd go in this direction:
LegacyModelService expose the CRUD operations as I have already done.
Expose the Unwieldy operations in another service. Should I make that a RIA Doamin Service or just plain WCF?
Access the Entity Framework model from the new UnwieldyOperationsService and manipulate the data layer there.
Explicitly reload or refresh the client domain context for the LegacyModelService at the client to reflect the changes that may have resultet from the UnwieldyOperation. What would be a good way get this done?
Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee707373%28VS.91%29.aspx for naming conventions over and above simple CRUD, maybe Invoke or Named Update operations would be suitable?
Related
I am learning some patterns, Unity of work / repository... There are some examples on web, but no one connects to more than one database.
In my applications almost always I have the need to get some object from a database (for example users) and some other object from another, how can I use the patterns ? (Since I am a novice on this subject an explicit example is a must)
Thank you!
As a general reference I advise you and anyone interested to visit http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/index.html
which has a collection of UML and explanation over the most common Design Pattern for enterprises software
In your specific case Unity of work is particularly suited to work along with Data Mapper and Identity Map. I guess to understand 100% unity of work one must master also the other 2 pattern.
To answer your question I think you can create a unity of work and save it in a registry, so it is available all over the application. The unity must be a singleton since you need to ensure a central gateway to communicate with the database. Inside your unity of work you will have an identity map which is a collection of valued Objects in memory representing your model which is responsible to maintain the object states during all the application's operations. The unity will be used by your service layer to perform CRUD operations over the model and commit these changes.
To work with more databases I guess you need to leverage some sort of namespaced access to the object stored in the Identity map. You have the choice where to namespace: unity of work or identity map. The decision is really up to your application and use cases. You might need to connect to different DBs for splitting responsibilities between read and write or trying to integrate heterogeneous data sources.
An alternative would be to inject the DB object into the unity of work methods, in this case the application has 100% control over which database is used.
The repository pattern as far as I understand helps you to abstract to the storage of you model and it is particularly useful when you are working with heterogeneous data sources of you must provide such a flexibility to your application. Therefore I guess it is quite different from unity of work and Data Mapper layer.
Let me set up my LOB scenario.
I am re-writing our core business app. The requirements are that I create an internally usable app (I'd like to use Silverlight) that our employees use on a daily basis. I also need to provide a SOAP service that can be used to input orders, get invoices, etc.
I also will be doing this in pieces, so when I update a record in the new SQL Server database, I need to make sure to update our legacy SQL Server as well.
So, it certainly makes sense to create a DAL that will pull data from the new SQL server, as well as write back to 2 data stores.
It would also make sense to create a BLL that can be used by both Silverlight/RIA and the WCF web services.
I have created a data entity of the new database in it's own project and it is used in all the other projects. The problem here is that RIA seems to require that I create it right inside the ASP.Net project in order to get the metadata for Silverlight. Without this, I need to manually re-create the metadata for Silverlight to access it correctly.
My question then, should I create duplicates of the Entity Model? One for RIA and one for everything else? Is there a better way to do this? Should I just forego using RIA and have Silverlight access WCF services? Or should I just continue to duplicate the metadata in RIA?
We use entities for direct reference to storage and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) which are almost identical for passing back/forth between BLL and WCF/GUI/etc. We map between the 2 using AutoMapper which means there's very little additional work but we don't have to worry about if a given entity is attached to the context/tracking state changes/etc...
Edit: You definitely want to keep your code as DRY as possible. Personally, I'd look at using DTOs above the BLL and either having 2 sets of repositories which are co-ordinated in the DAL (one RW, one W only). or even having Meta-repositories which handle the datasets on the 2 stores themselves.
If you're not already using it, Unity and IoC would be of real benefit to you here. You might also want to use one of the modular code patterns to allow you to register [n] data stores in different modes, so that when you finally want to retire the old store, you don't need to do much work.
I'd also question whether your entities need to be defined in ASP.Net - you may simple be able to reference the appropriate DLLs from your entity/DTO project and add the appropriate markup/config
I'm still pretty new to Silverlight, quite new to WCF, and am trying to broaden my horizons into both. I'd like to learn what is considered to be good practices while doing so.
On the client side, I have a Silverlight application. On the server side, I have a database that the Silverlight application will be utilizing. In between the two (okay, it's server-side, but...), I have a WCF service that the client calls upon to get the data from the database.
I have created a class that is marked as a DataContract and is used by the WCF service. That class is an object model populated with data from the database. On the client side, when it requests and receives an instance of this class, it uses the instance data to instantiate and populate a client-defined object that has additional client-defined members.
It's my use of the DataContract that most worries me. To create an instance of an object to be serialized and sent, only to be pillaged for its data so another object can be created seems...inefficient. But if it's considered a good practice I can get past that.
I did consider going the route of a web handler (.ashx) and using a proprietary binary standard to communicate the data, but I think going the WCF route may be more applicable and usable in the future (thinking: job).
I don't see any particular problem with your approach.
In my mind what you're describing is the transfer of data from service to client as a DTO (data-transfer object), and then using that DTO to populate a view model object. It is also quite common for the DTO and view model objects to use varying levels of granularity in terms of the data they represent (typically DTOs will be more coarse grained), and the view model will contain behaviour that is specific to the UI.
You might want to look at tools and frameworks that help in the mapping between DTOs and view model objects. One of my favourites is AutoMapper.
In my WPF application data model I have multiple classes representing data for interaction with backend DB through WCF self hosted service.
Should I have multiple Data Contracts or multiple Service Contacts or Endpoints in my WCF Sevice for representing these multiple WPF data model classes? What is correct (or maybe the only) way to architect WCF in this case?
There is a design recommendation called Interface Segragation Principle which basically states what the iDesign WCF Coding Standards also say: don't make your interfaces (= your service contracts) too big and too unwieldy.
Consider this: you have a huge service contract with hundreds of methods, and some third party would like to implement a subset of functionality, maybe only two or three of those service methods. If you have a single huge service contract, they would have to implement their 3-4 service methods of interest, and all the others, they would have to stub a dummy - e.g. something like throw new NotImplementedException(); or something. This is not a good idea, in general.
So the basic principle should be: try to group your service contracts in such a way that if ever someone else needs to implement a subset, they most likely will find a single service contract that has all the methods they need, and nothing else. Try to group your service contracts by topics, e.g. if you have 6 methods to search addresses, put those in a separate service contract. If you have 7 other methods to insert new addresses, update and delete existing ones - that should probably be a separate service contract (since you could well imagine someone wanting to only search for addresses - not modify anything).
So I guess there's no real hard rule what is good or not - try to group your service into "logically connected" groups of methods. That's not an easy thing to do, for sure! But it's worth the effort to think about how others might be using your services.
Also, if you have a few smaller service contracts, it's also a lot easier if you ever need to change anything. If you need to introduce a breaking change into a service contract, only those (hopefully few) users of that particular service contract with a few methods will be affected. If you always have to change your huge 200 method service contract, you'll always affect everyone - that might not be a good thing!
In WCF terms a data contract is a class used in a service contract operation. It's called a data contract because it is usually annotated with the DataContractAttribute in order to be recognized and serialized successfully (although starting from .NET 3.5 SP1 DataContractSerializer works with POCO objects and this attribute is no longer required). So you could have a single service contract with multiple operations dealing with multiple data contracts all exposed in a single endpoint.
I've got a set of classes, namely, a data transfer object, a service implementation object, and a data access object. I currently have business logic in the service implementation object; it uses the dao to get data to populate the dto that is shipped back to the client/gui code.
The issue is that I can't create a lightweight junit test of the service implementation object(it's a servlet); I think the business logic should be elsewhere, but the only thing I can think of is putting business logic in the dao or in yet another layer that goes between the dao and the service implementation.
Are there other options, or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
It's a GWT/App Engine project.
I don't understand why you can't unit-test the servlet, e.g. as per this SO question (there are others on similar themes) -- can you please explain?
Edit: if there's no special reason, I suggest you should the business logic in the service layer (where it seems to belong) and unit-test it there -- the approaches suggested in the SO question I just quoted, for example, seem reasonably lightweight (though I didn't test them specifically).
You can put your business logic in it's own jar file and test this component independently from the integration with the web (servlet)
The servlet is just a protocol, it is not your business logic, more an integration point.
It must be easy to imagine to expose your same business logic through a thick client.
Also in that case, you should not hide the business logic under buttons or links.
One more note: you might want to look into the MVC framework; struts. Your model will hold the business logic.
Hope this helps.
The servlet is the controller , it is a very big mistake, to put the business logic there.