Business Objects and Data Layer

Question

Hello,

This site has provided me with many useful answers, however after a hours search I haven't found anything that specifically answers my needs. So here goes...

The company I'm working for is in the process of designing a new Business Objects Layer and a Data Access Layer - these will reside in separate assemblies.

The problem is I'm having a hard time getting my head around the interaction between these two layers - specifically, should the DAL know about the BOL, I've read numerous articles that have said the dependency order should go something like this:

GUI / Presentation --> BOL ---> DAL

But as far as I can see, the DAL needs a reference to the BOL in order to be able to 'return' objects to the BOL layer.

I'm going for a intermediate assembly between the BOL and DAL which will be basically a thin layer filled with interfaces to decouple those two DLL's, so the framework can use different DALs if the need arises.

This lead me to the idea of introducing another thin layer with a bunch of interfaces that the BOs implement, then when the BOL calls the DAL interface, it passes it an object which implements one of these BO interfaces and then the DAL proceeds to populate the object. This removes all dependencies between the BOL and the DAL - however, I'm finding it hard to justify it to be honest.

Ideally we would like to use an ORM as it just removes the need to write CRUD stuff but our clients have a habit of fiddling with column lengths on their database and this is the cause of most of our errors to-date using the strongly typed DataTables. I've heard Linq2SQL also stores column lengths at compile time, not sure if NHibernate does or not (but, I'm not sure if our Database Schema is designed cleanly enough for NHibernate, pitfalls of dealing with legacy systems).

So yea, any insight on the relationship between a BOL and a DAL would be very much welcome - apologies if the above is poorly written, if anyone needs clarification I'll be happy to provide more detail.

Marlon

Answer 1

The way the I do this is the BO expects a DataReader or a DataContext or whatever back from the DAL, not the actual formed object. It is then the job of the BO layer to take and fill itself from the object that came back. The DAL isn't returning back a completed BO. The main thing to remember is that changing something in the BO layer shouldn't cause issues for the DAL layer, but changing something in the DAL layer could cause issues for the BO layer.

A short example of what I typically do

In the BO layer

FillData(){
   DataReader dr = DataLayer.GetData("SomePropertyForAStoreProcedure");
   If dr.Read(){
    Property1 = dr.GetValue("Property1");
    //So on and so forth
   }
}

In the DAL

DataReader GetData(String SPProperty){

}

Answer 2

take a look at SubSonic http://subsonicproject.com/ it does most of the data access tedious work for you and it's easier than most ORMs out there

Answer 3

The DAL needs a reference to the BOL so that it can populate the objects. What you do not want to have is any reference or coupling from the BOL back to the DAL - doing so causes your BOL to be coupled to a specific database implementation. When you think about it this makes sense. Your DAL knows details about the business objects down to the level of properties and how to retrieve their data from the database - of course the DAL is inherently tightly coupled to the BOL. So the reference that way is fine. And if you think about it what is on the other side? The database. "Tightly coupling" going from your object data to your database? Yeah, it is pretty darn tight. The concept is not very meaningful even.

It is all the other direction where you need to decouple. So yes as long as there is no direct coupling from the DAL into the BOL you can change your data platform anyway you want.

Not much point in creating interfaces for BOs and passing them to DAL in this scenario. You might sometimes need to go the other way however. As a rule business objects should not have to know anything about how they are either created or persisted.

In practice even with most ORMs, for example, creating a business layer completely free of any sort of persistence artifacts can become very difficult, sometimes effectively not possible. So occasionally you have something that is just too difficult to work around though, and you might find that strictly avoiding having any data knowledge in BOs is leading you to over complexity that is degrading rather than adding value.

If you feel like there is no better way and you need to have something persisted from within the BOL, create a simple interface so that the DAL functionality can be passed into the BOL. That way you can still keep the BOL decoupled from the specific database implementation at least.

Also, although it is a lot of additional work, unless this is a very simple throwaway app, I strongly recommend that you also add another layer between the UI and the BOL. The MVP (Model-View-Presenter) pattern is a general purpose design pattern for reducing coupling between the core app and the UI. There are a lot of variants on presenters, don't get too caught up in the specific details, just start off with the simple MVP if you have never used it.

The patterns is not that hard, it is just that UI itself is so messy that it may take you at least a couple of major iterations / applications before you feel like the code you are writing at any time is systematically and methodically working to decouple the UI. Just keep working at it, start to acquire an arsenal of techniques, and don't get hung up on the fact that you really have not achieved a sharp clean separation yet. Anything and everything you learn and can do that even contributes a little to creating creating a well defined boundary at the UI is a big step in the right direction.

Answer 4

It also depends on if/what library/ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) you use. When using a (good) ORM, the DAL should be a very remote concern, because it is almost completely hidden by the ORM; however, best practices dictate that even then, for medium to large size applications, you should introduce another layer between the BOL and ORM, usually DTO (Data Transfer Objects). DTOs can also be used without an ORM, as they are just dumb objects defined in a separate library, and the DAL can be responsible for persisting them (transforming them from/to database structures), while the BOL can query the DAL and receive those objects.

Decoupling the layers can be achieved in a variety of ways, most commonly through interfaces and/or MEF or another DI/IOC framework. Any such technique achieves more than sufficient decoupling if used effectively.

Also, depending on the technology used, as Sisyphus said, one of the layered architectural patterns will help separate concerns nicely: MVC, MVP, MVVM etc. I personally recommend MVVM with WPF (desktop) or Silverlight (web) but I'm highly biased - i.e. I love both of them to death :)