markhildreth

Domain Modeling Made Functional questions

@swlaschin

Written in the persistence chapter under the section “Writing to a relational database”, that “we convert our domain object to a DTO and then execute an insert or update command.” I have a few questions on this.

1.) This doesn’t really seem to handle deletes. How would you recommend handle a command which deletes the root aggregate (and presumably all of its “children”)? Would the DTO just end up being a “null” which the persistence mechanism takes to mean “delete it all”?

2.) More troublesome, how would the aggregate root not be deleted but a child be deleted (e.g., removing an order line from an order).

Would we need to “mark” the line as deleted in our aggregate in order to know during persistence that it should be deleted? That seems like it would complicate the model for reasons of persistence.

Or perhaps our persistence logic deletes all order lines in the DB with IDs that are not in the order line DTO array?

Or maybe we retrieve the current state of the database as a DTO, do a diff with the DTO created as a result of our command

3.) In both of these questions (and specifically the second), there is the problem of concurrent transactions affecting the same aggregate. Are we essentially forced to use serializable transactions or record locking if we want to ensure that two transactions are not stepping on each others toes? Or is there another strategy here (besides strategies like event sourcing).

Thanks

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#question /book-domain-modeling-made-functional

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2023-03-05 18:33:50 UTC

First Post!

swlaschin

Author of Domain Modeling Made Functional

Thanks for the questions!

Deletes generally just need an entity id, not a DTO. For a compound object like an Order, if the database supports it, I would set up a cascade delete. Otherwise you could query for the subobjects and explicitly delete them. In both cases I would hide all this logic inside the infrastructure component (API call wrapper) rather than exposing it to the domain logic.
Removing a line from an Order would be treated as an Update from the domain’s point of view. It depends whether you want to expose the logic to the domain layer. If you want to hide it, I would pass in the modified DTO without the line and then, inside the infrastructure component (the API call wrapper), figure out which lines are missing (delete), which lines are added (insert), and which lines are changed (update). This approach means that ANY updates to the aggregate root (additions, subtractions, etc) are handled the same way, using the same infrastructure method. More complicated, but it keeps the domain logic simple.
The problem of concurrent changes to the same aggregate is not specific to any particular design method and there are standard approaches you can use. If you have independent processes updating the database, you can use pessimistic concurrency (locks, transactions) or optimistic concurrency (versioning, timestamps). If everything is handled by one server (e.g. when doing microservices), then you can represent each aggregate root with an agent, and changes to the object are queued up and serialized that way. Or, yes, you can use event sourcing