Repository Pattern: How many repositories are needed to get a Contact with two Addresses?

Question

If you have one Contact, with a 1:* relationship with Addresses, and possibly one or more other tables used to hold the persisted value objects -- how many repositories should there be?

Should there be just one ContactRepository with one public method (GetContact(), that internally calls a private method (GetAddresses)) that returns a fully hydrated entity (Contact+Addreses)?

Or should there be two Repositories -- one For Contacts, one for Addresses with the COntactsRepository calling the AddressRepository?

Or other?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Can anything other than a Contact have an Address?

If not, I'd probably think about having just a ContactRepository.

If there also exist entities like Orders, Events, etc, that have Addresses, I'd think about a separate AddressRepository.

Your Mulberry road/drive example implies that you only want one address record for "123 Mulberry Rd", no matter how many Contacts have that address, that might well create more impetus to do an AddressRepository.