Business library reuse or exposing services

Question

I am having trouble deciding between two possible design choices. I have a web site which has a pretty extensive business layer and DAL (website, bll, and dal are all in multiple separate dlls). I need to design a windows service that can take some of my business objects, write them to a file, and store them locally within our network. The files are then imported into a 3rd party program which does further processing on them.

I can design this service one of two ways:

1. Wrap the service around the business layer and DAL. This would be quick and easy but the downside is every time the business layer changes, the service will have to be updated.

2. Add a web service to the web site and just query the web service for what I need. The windows service wouldn't have to use the business layer and as long as the web service doesn't change, I'll be good. The only downside is that I may have to create some basic business objects to parse the web service's xml into.

The windows service will have to poll the business layer/dal or web service every 10-20 minutes or so. The windows service is necessary because the web site is hosted offsite and thus doesn't have access to any of our local resources. I am leaning towards option 2 but I'm torn.

Given the two choices, which is the better option? Are there other possible options that I haven't considered? Also, how do you usually design for situations where you have one core set of libraries that are primarly used by a website but may end up being used either for data retrieval or to perform some function?

Answer 1

For more flexibility instead of hard-wrapping your service around business and DAL, and instead of relying on the web site (through integrated web service) make use of design concepts like: interfaces, dynamic Type loading, Inversion of Control so your service is a thin decoupled layer that communicates with the business and DAL and allows for dynamic updates of the business and DAL without recompiling the service. Maybe put assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache of the machine to be shared across various other projects assemblies and apps.

I know it seems like throwing out jargon for the sake of it but that's how I would start to think.

Edit:

Loading types dynamically is actually amazing and easy. This is a quick C# pseudo code for one way, and without testing it might actually be right.

// Get a System.Type from string representation
Type t = Type.GetType("type name");
// Create instance of type.
object o = Activator.CreateInstance(t);
// Cast it to the interface (or actual Type) you're working with.
IMyInterface strongObject = (IMyInterface)o;
// ... and continue from there with the instance.

Instructions about how to formulate the string representation of a type name can be found in MSDN under Type.AssemblyQualifiedName, Type.GetType and similar places. In short you can see a lot of assembly qualified type names in the app.config or web.config files because they use the same format.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what the criteria is for storing certain business objects as files on the network, but if you're doing this on a regular basis then presumably you are trying to track changes of some kind, so there is another solution: Build the logic directly into the business/persistence layer.

If this secondary file storage is a business requirement, then it ought to be embedded directly in that tier and triggered by some sort of event. That way, instead of having an what is essentially an ad-hoc post-processing job that can get out of sync with the rest of the system, you have just one coherent system.

Invert the design - instead of wrapping a web service around the business services and using it for ad-hoc reporting, create a web service that encapsulates the data you need to receive from the export on a regular basis, and have your business tier send messages to it when new data is ready. You can send messages asynchronously so as not to tie up the business services, and depending on your reliability requirements you could set up a message queue (it's easier than it sounds, WCF already knows how to use MSMQ as the delivery mechanism, it's just a few configuration settings to change).

I can't say with any certainty that this is better than your first two options without knowing a good deal more about the architecture, the amount and type of data, the scheduling and reporting requirements, etc., but it is something you should consider. If you think that your business services are likely to change fairly frequently, then it might work better have it push data outward to a "warehouse" type abstraction rather than having a mining process to pull it.

Otherwise, I think I would go with option 2. I don't know if you've worked with WCF services before but you should know that you never actually have to parse XML. Everything is done through data contracts and when you generate a proxy for the web service, you get strongly-typed .NET objects. If you can pass your domain objects directly through the service API then it's really very little work at all to create the web service.

The real downside to a web service is that you have to take steps to ensure that your service contract never substantially changes (otherwise it can break clients). So you might eventually end up needing to create Data Transfer Objects on the service side to use as the public API instead of passing through domain objects. But in many cases you won't need to do this for a good long while, so go ahead and try it out, you'll see that it's pretty straightforward.

Answer 3

From your point two I understand, that you would just add the web-api for this extra-service. Thus, you would have to update two parts for any changes (extra-service, web-api, dll). With option one you would only have to update two parts (extra-service, dll), thus I would go with one.

BUT if you target for a general web api which you always have to maintain, go with option two.

Answer 4

A variant of option two:

Add a WCF service to the site, exposing the information required as basic DTO DataContracts. You could use AutoMapper or similar within the WCF service to handle the boring bit of converting your business objects to DTOs.