Making OR/M loosely coupled and abstracted away from other layers.

Question

Hi all.

In an n-tier architecture, the best place to put an object-relational mapping (OR/M) code is in the data access layer. For example, database queries and updates can be delegated to a tool like NHibernate.

Yet, I'd like to keep all references to NHibernate within the data access layer and abstract dependencies away from the layers below or above it. That way, I can swap or plug in another OR/M tool (e.g. Entity Framework) or some approach (e.g. plain vanilla stored procedure calls, mock objects) without causing compile-time errors or a major overhaul of the entire application. Testability is an added bonus.

Could someone please suggest a wrapper (i.e. an interface or base class) or approach that would keep OR/M loosely coupled and contained in 1 layer? Or point me to resources that would help?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It sounds like you are looking for the repository pattern. If you need more decoupling, you can inject the data dependencies with an Inversion of Control container.

Answer 2

Service Facade Pattern is one name. Simple contracts between business logic and data layer.

Service classes or beans (call it what you want) define and implement the contract, and orchestrate the lower data layer, often handling the transactional logic across data objects.

In Spring, you define an Interface, and then implement it. One implementation might be an OR/M, another might be raw JDBC or ADO.NET. In some frameworks, Aspect Oriented Programming allows you to inject declarative transactional logic without writing any code. It saves a lot of headache.

One caveat: When dealing with some OR/Ms like Hibernate, there is the use of proxy classes. This does pollute things, because there are a few instances where the proxy classes cause problems. In my opinion, that is an implemtation detail that should not escape the service layer. But with Hibernate, it does. Not sure about the .NET implementation.