MVC: Repositories and Services

Question

I am confused as to the limitations of what gets defined in the Repositories and what to leave to the Services. Should the repository only create simple entities matching tables from the database or can it create complex custom object with combinations of those entities?

in other words: Should Services be making various Linq to SQL queries on the Repository? Or should all the queries be predefined in the Repository and the business logic simply decide which method to call?

Answer 1

You've actually raised a question here that's currently generating a lot of discussion in the developer community - see the follow-up comments to Should my repository expose IQueryable?

The repository can - and should - create complex combination objects containing multiple associated entities. In domain-driven design, these are called aggregates - collections of associated objects organized into some cohesive structure. Your code doesn't have to call GetCustomer(), GetOrdersForCustomer(), GetInvoicesForCustomer() separately - you just call myCustomerRepository.Load(customerId), and you get back a deep customer object with those properties already instantiated. I should also add that if you're returning individual objects based on specific database tables, then that's a perfectly valid approach, but it's not really a repository per sé - it's just a data-access layer.

On one hand, there is a compelling argument that Linq-to-SQL objects, with their 'smart' properties and their deferred execution (i.e. not loading Customer.Orders until you actually use it) are a completely valid implementation of the repository pattern, because you're not actually running database code, you're running LINQ statements (which are then translated into DB code by the underlying LINQ provider)

On the other hand, as Matt Briggs' post points out, L2S is fairly tightly coupled to your database structure (one class per table) and has limitations (no many-many mappings, for example) - and you may be better off using L2S for data access within your repository, but then map the L2S objects onto your own domain model objects and return those.

Answer 2

A repository should be the only piece of your application that knows anything about your data access technology. So it should not be returning objects generated by L2S at all, but map those properties to model objects of your own.

If you are using this sort of pattern, you may want to re think L2S. It generates up a data access layer for you, but doesn't really handle impedance mismatch, you have to do that manually. If you look at something like NHibernate, that mapping is done in a more robust fashion. L2S is more for a 2 tier application, where you want a quick and dirty DAL that you can extend on easily.