What's the best way to separate concerns for this code?

Question

In a previous question one of the comments from Dr. Herbie on the accepted answer was that my method was performing two responsibilities..that of changing data and saving data.

What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to separate these concerns in my situation.

Carrying on with my example of having a Policy object which is retrieved via NHibernate....

The way I'm currently setting the policy to inactive is as follows:

Policy policy = new Policy();
policy.Status = Active;

policyManager.Inactivate(policy);

//method in PolicyManager which has data access and update responsibility
public void Inactivate(Policy policy)
{
    policy.Status = Inactive;
    Update(policy);
}

If I were to separate the responsibility of data access and data update what would be the best way to go about it?

Is it better to have the PolicyManager (which acts as the gateway to the dao) manage the state of the Policy object:

Policy policy = new Policy();
policy.Status = Active;

policyManager.Inactivate(policy);
policyManager.Update(policy);

//method in PolicyManager
public void Inactivate(Policy policy)
{
    policy.Status = Inactive;
}

Or to have the Policy object maintain it's own state and then use the manager class to save the information to the database:

Policy policy = new Policy();
policy.Status = Active;

policy.Inactivate();

policyManager.Update(policy);

//method in Policy
public void Inactivate()
{
    this.Status = Inactive;
}

Answer 1

What I would do:

• Create a repository which saves and retrieves Policies. (PolicyRepository)

• If you have complex logic that must be performed to activate / deactivate a policy, you could create a Service for that. If that service needs access to the database, then you can pass a PolicyRepository to it, if necessary. If no complex logic is involved, and activating / deactivating a policy is just a matter of setting a flag to false or true, or if only members of the policy class are involved, then why is 'Activated' not a simple property of the Policy class which you can set to false / true ? I would only create a service, if other objects are involved, or if DB access is required to activate or deactivate a policy.