Where should I put a unique check in DDD?

Question

I'm working on my first DDD project, and I think I understand the basic roles of entities, data access objects, and their relationship. I have a basic validation implementation that stores each validation rule with it's associated entity. This works fine for rules that apply to only the current entity, but falls apart when other data is needed. For example, if I have the restriction that a username must be unique, I would like the IsValid() call to return false when there is an existing user with the current name.

However, I'm not finding any clean way to keep this validation rule on the entity itself. I'd like to have an IsNameUnique function on the entity, but most of the solutions to do this would require me to inject a user data access object. Should this logic be in an external service? If so, how do I still keep the logic with the entity itself? Or is this something that should be outside of the user entity?

Thanks!

Answer 1

In DDD, there ia a concept called aggregate. It is basically responsible for consistency within the application.

IMHO, in this case specifically, I guess the CustomerRepository would be inside something like the "Customer aggregate", being the Customer class the aggregate root.

The root would then be responsible for doing all this stuff, and no one else could access the CustomerRepository options. And there are some possibilities:

• The CustomerRepository could throw an exception if the name is not unique (and the Customer would catch and return the error, or something like that)
• The CustomerRepository could have an IsValidUserName(), that the Customer would call before doing anything else
• Any other option you can think of

Answer 2

I like Samuel's response, but for the sake of simplicity, I would recommend implementing a Specification. You create a Specification that returns a boolean to see if an object meets certain criteria. Inject an IUserRepository into the Specification, check if a user already exists with that name, and return a boolean result.

public interface ISpecification<T>
{
  bool IsSatisfiedBy(TEntity entity);
}

public class UniqueUsernameSpecification : ISpecification<User>
{
  private readonly IUserRepository _userRepository;

  public UniqueUsernameSpecification(IUserRepository userRepository)
  {
    _userRepository = userRepository;
  }

  public bool IsSatisfiedBy(User user)
  {
    User foundUser = _userRepository.FindUserByUsername(user.Username);
    return foundUser == null;
  }
}

//App code    
User newUser;

// ... registration stuff...

var userRepository = new UserRepository();
var uniqueUserSpec = new UniqueUsernameSpecification(userRepository);
if (uniqueUserSpec.IsSatisfiedBy(newUser))
{
  // proceed
}