If I expose IQueryable from my service layer, wouldn't the database calls be less if I need to grab information from multiple services?
For example, I'd like to display 2 separate lists on a page, Posts and Users. I have 2 separate services that provides a list of these. If both provides IQueryable, will they be joint in 1 database call? Each repository creates a context for itself.
It's best to think of an IQueryable<T> as a single query waiting to be run. So if you return 2 IQueryable<T> instances and run them in the controller, it wouldn't be any different than running them separably in their own service methods. Each time you execute the IQuerable<T> to get results, it will run the query by itself independent of other IQuerable<T> objects.
The only time (as far as I know) it will make an impact if there is enough time between the two service calls that the database connection might close, but you would need a considerable amount of time in between the service calls for that to be the case.
Returning IQuerable<T> to the controller still has some usefulness, such as easier handling of paging and sorting (so sorting is done on the controller and is not done on the service layer which doesn't necessarily care about how data is sorted or paged). This isn't a performance concern though, and people will disagree about if it's best to do this in the controller or not (I've seen reputable developers do this and give well thought out reasons why).
No. The best an IQueryable can do is reduce the number of calls within a singular database context. An IQueryable will not cross contexts.
Personally, I don't use IQueryables past the repositories for a number of reasons:
1) I don't use the same domain objects as database objects, and seeing "no translation to SQL" pisses me off ;)
2) I don't like the necessary structure for IQueryables in views: foreach (var item in collection){var tempItem = item; code on tempItem}
3) I've come up with a method of passing generic filters to the data layer (LinqKit and PredicateBuilder are gods)
If these reasons don't apply to you, of course you should feel free to use IQueryables to whichever layer you desire.
Not with two different contexts.
Definitely NO. It's a leaky abstraction.
It allows abominations like this:
q.Where(x=>{Console.WriteLine("fail");return true;});
Thing is - when exposing IQueryable, You are saying that Your data layer fully supports linq to objects.
If you make two method calls you will make two queries.
You can combine the methods into a single method which gets all the data at once.
If you are implementing the repository pattern you will have an easier time if you instantiate one database context per request.
Your service layer is exactly that, a layer which serves up what you need. Often times my service layers are named things like SearchService which has methods for returning every packaged collection I will ever need (the actual view models themselves). And if I ever need a new search, my service layer gets a new method. The backing for your service layer can then contain any data backing or persistence model you would like, be it a repository or Entity Framework provider, etc.
To answer your question though, the line needs to be drawn at the service layer, all queries need to be contained within it and only data returned.
Related
I'm building a web application with Spring, and I'm at the point where I have an Entity, a Repository, a RestController, and I can access endpoints in my browser.
I'm now trying to return JSON data to the browser, and I'm seeing all of this stuff about DTOs in various guides.
Do I really need a DTO? Can't I just put the serialization logic on the entity itself?
I think, this is a little bit debatable question, where the short answer would be:
It depends.
Little longer answer
There are plenty of people, who, in plenty of cases, would prefer one approach (using DTOs) over another (using bare entities), and vice versa; however, there is no the single source of truth on which is better to use.
It very much depends on the requirements, architectural approach you decide to stick with, (even on) personal preference and other (project-related) specific details.
Some even claim that DTO is an anti-pattern; some love using them; some think, that data refinement/adjustment should happen on the consumer/client side (for various reasons, out of which, one can be No Policy for API changes).
That being said, YES, you can simply return the #Entity instance (or list of entities) right from your controller and there is no problem with this approach. I would even say, that this does not necessarily violate something from SOLID or Clean Code principles.again, it depends on what do you use a response for, what representation of data do you need, what should be the capacity and purpose of the object in question, and etc..
DTO is generally a good practice in the following scenarios:
When you want to aggregate the data for your object from different resources, i.e. you want to put some object transformation logic between the Persistence Layer and the Business(or Web) Layer:
Imagine you fetch from your database a List<Employee>; however, from another 3rd party web-service, you also receive some complementary-to-employee data for each Employee object, which you have to aggregate in the Employee objects (aggregate, or do some calculation, or etc. point is that you want to combine the data from different resources). This is a good case when you might want to use DTO pattern. It is reusable, it conforms to Single-Responsibility Principle, and it is well segregated from other layers;
When you don't necessarily combine data received from different sources, but you want to modify the entity which you will be returning:
Imagine you have a very big Entity (with a lot of fields), and the client, which calls the corresponding endpoint (Front-End application, Mobile, or any client), has no need of receiving this huge entity (or list of entities). If you, despite the client's requirement, will still be sending the original/unchanged entity, you will end up consuming network bandwidth/load inefficiently (more than enough), performance will be weaker, and generally, you will be just wasting computing resources for no good reason. In this case, you might want to transform your original Entity to the DTO object, which the client needs (only with required fields). Here, you might even want to implement different DTO classes, for one entity, for different consumers/clients.
However, if you are sure, that your table/relation representations (instances of #Entity classes) are exactly what the client needs, I see no necessity of introducing DTOs.
Supporting further the idea, that #Entity can be returned to the presentation layer without DTO
Java Persistence with Hibernate, Second Edition, in §3.3.2, even motivates it explicitly, that:
You can reuse persistent classes outside the context of persistence, in unit tests or in the presentation layer, for example. You can create instances in any runtime environment with the regular Java new operator, preserving testability and reusability;
Hibernate entities do not need to be explicitly Serializable;
You might also want to have a look at this question.
In general, it’s up to you to decide. If your application is relatively simple and you don’t expose any sensitive information, an response is y ambiguous for the client, there is nothing criminal in returning back the whole entity. If your client expect a small slice of entity, eg only 2-3 fields from 30 fields entity, then it make sense to do the translation or consider different protocol such as GraphQL.
It is ideal design where you should not expose the entity.
It is a good design to convert your entity to DTO before you pass the same to web layer.
These days RestJpacontrollers are also available.
But again it all varies from application to application which one to use.
If your application does a need only read only operation then make sense to use RestJpacontrollers and can use entity at web layer.
In other case where application modifies data frequently then in that case better option to opt DTO and use it at the UI layer.
Another case is of multiple requests are required to bring data for a particular task. In the same case data to be brought can be combined in a DTO so that only one request can bring all the required data.
We can use data of multiple entities data into one DTO.
This DTO can be used for the front end or in the rest API.
Do I really need a DTO? Can't I just put the serialization logic on the entity itself?
I'd say you don't, but it is better to use them, according to SOLID principles, namely single responsibility one. Entities are ORM should be used to interact with database, not being serialized and passed to the other layers.
I have a n-tier application based on pretty classic different layers: User Interface, Services (WCF), Business Logic and Data Access.
Database (Sql Server) is obviously quered throught Entity Framework, the problem is basically that every call starts from user interface and go throught all the layers, but doing that I need to create a new ObjectContext each time for every operation and that makes performance very bad because every time I need to reload metadata and recompile the query.
The most suggested pattern it would be the one below and it is what I'm actually doing: creating and passing the new context throught business layer methods each time the service receives a call
public BusinessObject GetQuery(){
using (MyObjectContext context = new MyObjectContext()){
//..do something } }
For easy query I don't see any particular dealy and it works fine but for complex and heavy query it makes a 2 seconds query to keep going for like 15 seconds each call.
I could set the ObjectContext static and it would solve the performance issue but it appears to be not suggested by anyone, also because I won't be able to access the context at the same time from different thread and multiple calls raise an exception. I could make it thread-safe but mantain the same ObjectContext for long time makes it bigger and bigger (and slower) because the reference it imports each query it execute a query.
The architecture I have I think it is the most common so what is the best and known way to implement and use ObjectContext?
Thank you,
Marco
In a Web context, it's best to use a stateless approach and create an ObjectContext for each request.
The cost of ObjectContext construction are minimal. The metadata is loaded from a global cache so only the first call will have to load it.
Static is definitely not a good idea. The ObjectContext is not thread save and this will lead to problems when using it in a WCF service with multiple calls. Making it thread save will result in less performance and it can cause subtle errors when reusing it in multiple requests.
Check this info: How to decide on a lifetime for your ObjectContext
Working with a static object context is not a good idea. A static context will be shared by all users of the web application meaning that when one user makes modifications to a context such as calling saveChanges , all other users using the context will be affected (this would be a problem when supposing they have added or updated data to the context but have not called save changes). The best practice while working with object context is to keep it alive for the period of the request and use if to perform any atomic business operations. You would want to check out the UnitOfWork pattern and repository pattern
uow
uow and repository in EF
If you feel you are having performance issues with your queries and there is a possibility that you would reuse your query , I would recommend you use precompiled linq queries. You can check out the links below for more info
precompiled linq julie lermann
precompiled linq
What you show is the typical pattern to use a context - by request, similar to using a database connection.
What makes you think the bad performance is related to recreating the context? This is very, very likely not the case. How did you measure this impact?
If you have such performance critical code that this overhead truly matters you should not use Entity Framework since there always will be some overhead, even if the overhead should be very little in the general case. I would start focusing on your data model though and the underlying data store which will have a much larger impact on your query performance. Have you optimized your queries? Did you put indexes everywhere you need them? Can you de-normalize the data to remove joins?
1) What are the BLL-services? What's the difference between them and Service Layer services? What goes to domain services and what goes to service layer?
2) Howcome I refactor BBL model to give it a behavior: Post entity holds a collection of feedbacks which already makes it possible to add another Feedback thru feedbacks.Add(feedback). Obviosly there are no calculations in a plain blog application. Should I define a method to add a Feedback inside Post entity? Or should that behavior be mantained by a corresponing service?
3) Should I use Unit-Of-Work (and UnitOfWork-Repositories) pattern like it's described in http://www.amazon.com/Professional-ASP-NET-Design-Patterns-Millett/dp/0470292784 or it would be enough to use NHibernate ISession?
1) Business Layer and Service Layer are actually synonyms. The 'official' DDD term is an Application Layer.
The role of an Application Layer is to coordinate work between Domain Services and the Domain Model. This could mean for example that an Application function first loads an entity trough a Repository and then calls a method on the entity that will do the actual work.
2) Sometimes when your application is mostly data-driven, building a full featured Domain Model can seem like overkill. However, in my opinion, when you get used to a Domain Model it's the only way you want to go.
In the Post and Feedback case, you want an AddFeedback(Feedback) method from the beginning because it leads to less coupling (you don't have to know if the FeedBack items are stored in a List or in a Hashtable for example) and it will offer you a nice extension point. What if you ever want to add a check that no more then 10 Feedback items are allowed. If you have an AddFeedback method, you can easily add the check in one single point.
3) The UnitOfWork and Repository pattern are a fundamental part of DDD. I'm no NHibernate expert but it's always a good idea to hide infrastructure specific details behind an interface. This will reduce coupling and improves testability.
I suggest you first read the DDD book or its short version to get a basic comprehension of the building blocks of DDD. There's no such thing as a BLL-Service or a Service layer Service. In DDD you've got
the Domain layer (the heart of your software where the domain objects reside)
the Application layer (orchestrates your application)
the Infrastructure layer (for persistence, message sending...)
the Presentation layer.
There can be Services in all these layers. A Service is just there to provide behaviour to a number of other objects, it has no state. For instance, a Domain layer Service is where you'd put cohesive business behaviour that does not belong in any particular domain entity and/or is required by many other objects. The inputs and ouputs of the operations it provides would typically be domain objects.
Anyway, whenever an operation seems to fit perfectly into an entity from a domain perspective (such as adding feedback to a post, which translates into Post.AddFeedback() or Post.Feedbacks.Add()), I always go for that rather than adding a Service that would only scatter the behaviour in different places and gradually lead to an anemic domain model. There can be exceptions, like when adding feedback to a post requires making connections between many different objects, but that is obviously not the case here.
You don't need a unit-of-work pattern on top on the NHibernate session:
Why would I use the Unit of Work pattern on top of an NHibernate session?
Using Unit of Work design pattern / NHibernate Sessions in an MVVM WPF
I have an application with about 20 models and controllers and am not using any particular framework. What is the best practice for using multiple remote objects in Flex performance-wise?
1) Method 1 - One per Component - Each component instantiates a RemoteObject for itself
2) Method 2 - Multiple in Application Root - Each controller is handled by a RemoteObject in the root
3) Method 3 - One in Application Root - Combine all controllers into one class and handle them with one RemoteObject
I'm guessing 3 will have the best performance but will be too messy to maintain and 1 would be the cleanest but would take a performance hit. What do you think?
Best practice would be "none of the above." Your Views should dispatch events that a controller or Command component would use to call your service(s) and then update your model on return of the data. Your Views would be bound to the data, and then the Views would automatically be updated with the new data.
My preference is to have one service Class per different piece or type of data I am retrieving--this makes it easier to build mock services that can be swapped for real services as needed depending on what you're doing (for instance if you have a complicated server setup, a developer who is working on skinning would use the mocks). But really, how you do that is a matter of personal preference.
So, where do your services live, so that a controller or command can reach them? If you use a Dependency Injection framework such as Robotlegs or Swiz, it will have a separate object that handles instantiating, storing, and and returning instances of model and service objects (in the case of Robotlegs, it also will create your Command objects for you and can create view management objects called Mediators). If you don't use one of these frameworks, you'll need to "roll your own," which can be a bit difficult if you're not architecturally minded.
One thing people who don't know how to roll their own (such as the people who wrote the older versions of Cairngorm) tend to fall back on is Singletons. These are not considered good practice in this day and age, especially if you are at all interested in unit testing your work. http://misko.hevery.com/code-reviewers-guide/flaw-brittle-global-state-singletons/
A lot depends on how much data you have, how many times it gets refreshed from the server, and of you have to support update as well as query.
Number 3 (and 2) are basically a singletons - which tends to work best for large applications and large datasets. Yes, it would be complex to maintain yourself, but that's why people tend to use frameworks (puremvc, cairgorm, etc). much of the complexity is handled for you. Caching data within the frameworks also enhances performance and response time.
The problem with 1 is if you have to coordinate data updates per component, you basically need to write a stateless UI, always retrieving the data from the server on each component visibility.
edit: I'm using cairgorm - have ~ 30 domain models (200 or so remote calls) and also use view models. some of my models (remote object) have 10's of thousands of object instances (records), I keep a cache with/write back. All of the complexity is encapsulated in the controller/commands. Performance is acceptable.
In terms of pure performance, all three of those should perform roughly the same. You'll of course use slightly more memory by having more instances of RemoteObject and there are a couple of extra bytes that get sent along with the first request that you've made with a given RemoteObject instance to your server (part of the AMF protocol). However, the effect of these things is negligible. As such, Amy is right that you should make a choice based on ease of maintainability and not performance.
I looked at the example on http://solitarygeek.com/java/developing-a-simple-java-application-with-spring/comment-page-1#comment-1639
I'm trying to figure out why the service layer is needed in the first place in the example he provides. If you took it out, then in your client, you could just do:
UserDao userDao = new UserDaoImpl();
Iterator users = userDao.getUsers();
while (…) {
…
}
It seems like the service layer is simply a wrapper around the DAO. Can someone give me a case where things could get messy if the service layer were removed? I just don’t see the point in having the service layer to begin with.
Having the service layer be a wrapper around the DAO is a common anti-pattern. In the example you give it is certainly not very useful. Using a service layer means you get several benefits:
you get to make a clear distinction between web type activity best done in the controller and generic business logic that is not web-related. You can test service-related business logic separately from controller logic.
you get to specify transaction behavior so if you have calls to multiple data access objects you can specify that they occur within the same transaction. In your example there's an initial call to a dao followed by a loop, which could presumably contain more dao calls. Keeping those calls within one transaction means that the database does less work (it doesn't have to create a new transaction for every call to a Dao) but more importantly it means the data retrieved is going to be more consistent.
you can nest services so that if one has different transactional behavior (requires its own transaction) you can enforce that.
you can use the postCommit interceptor to do notification stuff like sending emails, so that doesn't junk up the controller.
Typically I have services that encompass use cases for a single type of user, each method on the service is a single action (work to be done in a single request-response cycle) that that user would be performing, and unlike your example there is typically more than a simple data access object call going on in there.
Take a look at the following article:
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html
It all depends on where you want to put your logic - in your services or your domain objects.
The service layer approach is appropriate if you have a complex architecture and require different interfaces to your DAO's and data. It's also good to provide course grained methods for clients to call - which call out to multiple DAO's to get data.
However, in most cases what you want is a simple architecture so skip the service layer and look at a domain model approach. Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans and the InfoQ article here expand on this:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/ddd-in-practice
Using service layer is a well accepted design pattern in the java community. Yes, you could straightaway use the dao implementation but what if you want to apply some business rules.
Say, you want to perform some checks before allowing a user to login into the system. Where would you put those logics? Also, service layer is the place for transaction demarcation.
It’s generally good to keep your dao layer clean and lean. I suggest you read the article “Don’t repeat the DAO”. If you follow the principles in that article, you won’t be writing any implementation for your daos.
Also, kindly notice that the scope of that blog post was to help beginners in Spring. Spring is so powerful, that you can bend it to suit your needs with powerful concepts like aop etc.
Regards,
James