Foreword
In the last months, I had the pleasure to attend several reading sessions with Matthias Noback, the author of Advanced Web Application Architecture book.
During our sessions, I took the chance to ask the author some questions that emerged while reading the mentioned book.
In the series of my short DDD journey articles, I’ll summarize some of the insights that came out speaking with the author.
I hope these articles can be helpful to those that read the book; I warmly recommend it if you haven’t already done: get it with a special discount that the author reserved to the readers of my blog!
How to save child entities of an aggregate?
Let’s first recap what is an aggregate with Martin Fowler’s definition:
“An aggregate is a cluster of domain objects that can be treated as a single unit. An example may be an order and its line-items, these will be separate objects, but it’s useful to treat the order (together with its line items) as a single aggregate.”
I was just modeling an order aggregate and its order lines in a sample Laravel project to apply the book’s teachings.
Since I was using Laravel’s Eloquent ORM and Eloquent’s models can be related only to a single table, I mistakenly added both an OrderRepository and an OrderLinesRepository as Eloquent models.
I thought it could be the right thing to do because of the following sentence from Noback’s book on page 247 that I misinterpreted:
“Don’t make changes to multiple entities in the same transaction.”
It wasn’t wrong to store order lines in a separate table; what was wrong with my design was that by using a separate repository, I was violating the very concept of an aggregate, summarized by Martin Fowler as follows:
“Aggregates are the basic element of transfer of data storage - you request to load or save whole aggregates. Transactions should not cross aggregate boundaries.”
To solve the problem, I gave up using Eloquent, deleted OrderLinesRepository, and made the OrderRepository responsible for saving the aggregate as a whole.
Enjoy!
Photo credits: Christina @ wocintechchat.com - Creative Commons license
Posted with : ddd