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Making SharpArch 2.0: Who Can Help Me? Part 1

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Who Can Help Me? started life towards the end of 2009, after myself, Howard, James, and a host of other amazing ex-colleagues worked together on www.fancydressoutfitters.co.uk. We’d built the client-facing site using S#arp Arch and a bunch of other open source tools, and wanted to put together a vastly simplified sample app demonstrating how we did it. And so, we build Who Can Help Me? and put it out there for the community to play with.

Despite not originally being intended as a S#arp Arch demo, it was adopted as one. Which gave rise to the question: what do we do with it for S#arp Arch 2.0? When we built it, we wanted to demonstrate the architecture and toolset we used for an enterprise-level e-commerce site. We didn’t go out of our way to demonstrate any specific patterns, and we made no effort to demonstrate many of the nice features offered by the different tools we used. After some back and forth between the team we decided that things have moved on in the last 2 years, and whilst we are all still proud of the e-commerce site it was based on, WCHM is not representative of the way we choose to build websites today.

In addition, those who follow Ayende’s blog may have noticed his recent code review on WCHM. He raised some valid issues with the code, and fortunately there are several upcoming SA 2.0 features that will help me address them. So here’s the hit list for how WCHM 1.9.6 will go not only to 2.0, but also to being a true Sharp Architecture sample app.

Firstly, relevant points from Ayende’s review:

The mapping sucks

The pattern we adopted when writing our controllers is as follows:

  • Receive request.
  • Make request to tasks layer (aka application services); get domain entities returned.
  • Use mapper to map entities to view models.
  • Return view result, passing view model.

This looks extremely simple on paper, and for the most part it is. However it has a few issues:

  • It can get messy quickly, especially if your view requires several disparate pieces of data – in this case, the controller makes multiple calls to the tasks layer to retrieve the required data, which is then passed into a mapper. Often this mapper will use other mappers to map collections or child view models.
  • It is, as Ayende pointed out, a breeding ground for SELECT N+1 issues.

S#arp Arch 2.0 has a solution to this problem in the form of the Enhanced Query Object approach. So, to populate a view model we no longer make calls into the tasks layer. Instead we use a query object which retrieves all necessary data. Because the EQO talks directly to the NHibernate session we can bypass the layers of abstraction that Ayende derides in his posts, replacing it with LINQ/Criteria/HQL/named queries/whatever else we think is the right fit for the problem.

Too many specifications

There are quite a few specifications in the domain layer. They fit nicely into two categories:

  1. Specifications that just shouldn’t be there at all. This covers ProfileByIdSpecification and CategoryByIdSpecification. Simply put, these shouldn’t exist. Instead, the FindOne method on the relevent repository should be used, which simply passes through to the Session.Get<T> method.
  2. Specifications that aren’t really specifications. Unfortunately, this covers the remainder of the specifications. The problem is, a specification is really intended for codifying a business rule – so an OverdueInvoiceSpecification would capture what it means for an invoice to be overdue. When you look at it in that way, it’s pretty obvious that TagByNameSpecification (for example) is not codifying any business rule and as such has no place in the domain layer.

Unfortunately this means I’ll be deleting all the existing specifications. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a good example or two to replace them with.

Now, onto a few of my own points:

Anaemic Domain Model

Anaemic Domain Model (Wikipedia, Fowler) normally – and in my opinion, somewhat unfairly – gets labelled as an anti-pattern. It actually made a lot of sense in the original application, because in fact there was no domain logic to speak of. However, since Sharp Arch has all the DDD terms baked in, WCHM needs to do more than pay lip service to these, so I’ll be doing my best to improve this.

No obviously identified aggregate roots

Following on from the previous point – the code in WCHM doesn’t follow the DDD practice of accessing entities via aggregate roots only, so this will be another thing to improve.

Replace existing Tasks with Commands

WCHM currently uses a traditional tasks layer, with the different methods grouped up into a few different application services – CategoryTasks, ProfileTasks, etc. As described above, the query methods will be pulled out of these tasks and moved into queries that will be homed alongside the controllers. The remaining methods will be separated into commands, which will remain in the Tasks layer.

Merge Web.Controllers and Web

As detailed in Geoff’s Introductory post in this series, we’re merging controllers back into the main web project, and renaming to Presentation.

Summary

In reading this, you might think that I’m saying WCHM is a steaming pile of something unpleasant. Nothing could be further from the truth – www.fancydressoutfitters.co.uk is a project that I’m proud to have been part of, and WCHM is an extension of that. The site has been running with no significant unplanned downtime for nearly 2 years now, from a project that went from nothing to live in just ten 2 week sprints.

However, I hate it when code I’ve written is allowed to stagnate – like most of us, I look back on code I’ve written and think about all the ways it could be better. I hope that there will never be a day when I look back on one- or two-year old code and realise I’ve learned nothing since it was written. In the meantime, I’d appreciate any feedback people have on WCHM and this post.

@jon_george1


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