I will start off by giving my regular disclaimer, I am not an expert on this, however, I am also not an idiot either.

 

How It Was

 

We have been using Csla as a business object framework for about 3 years now and have had good results with it. That and we like things to just work and it does. Now a few months ago we started to get introduced to the altdotnet way and have seen the light and the need for many of the principles of altdotnet in our organization, it just makes sense. A few weeks ago Rhockford Lhotka release the beta version of Csla 3.6 and with it he has introduced support for an extensible ObjectFactory. This custom ObjectFactory takes the place of the DataPortal_XYZ() methods in the business object.

 

Now with the old way I had to make an object and write at least 3 lines of data access code for every property. This is cumbersome and just plain stinks. But good news! There is a better way.

 

The Better Way

 

So with this new ObjectFactory in Csla I can now spread some altdotnet goodness into my Csla projects. To be more specific here is what I have done, this has increased the dependencies of the project but has made the code much more flexible and easier to test.

• NHibernate – Powerful ORM
• StructureMap – Powerful yet fairly simple IoC container
• Fluent NHibernate – Let’s just say I loathe XML
• Lots of Unit Tests – Safety net

Hopefully this little overview has intrigued you enough to go download the source code for the Csla sample redone with an ObjectFactory implementation. The source code and zip file are available at http://code.google.com/p/cslaptrackerfactory/ I will update the repository as I make changes/ additions to the code. I have created this as an open source project because I know that my method is not the only method and hopefully we can collectively come up with a way to use Csla with altdotnet goodies in a more standard way. So with that said, if you want to join the project, drop me a line.

 

I will post more articles that go in depth on how/why I did things a certain way in this project later, I hopw.

Tags: CSLA, Development, NHibernate, StructureMap

We have been working the past few days on getting the new ObjectFactory up and running with CSLA 3.6. The approach we are taking is that we really want to abstract the Data Access Layer away from the Business Object so that we have some flexibility in the future to change the way we access the database. At the current time we are planning on using NHibernate as our ORM tool, one especially nice feature is that it is able to load your objects automatically so no more LoadProperty(SomeProperty) or ReadProperty(SomProperty) a million times. This one thing alone makes this very appealing to me.

This diagram above is a representation of the basic architecture of the system. What we are basically doing is using the Repository pattern to keep data access decoupled from the business object through the use of the ObjectFactory and StructureMap. This is a setup very similar to what Frank is using in his project. However we are not using DTO objects in between the Repository and the business object. We might change this later but for now we will let the ORM load the objects directly.

I am currently working on implementing the ProjectTracker from the CSLA examples. My goal with this is to accomplish several things:

1. Learn the ins and outs of the ObjectFactory and how it works with StructureMap, NHibernate, Mock Objects, TDD, etc..
2. Provide a working drop in replacement to the “stock” ProjectTracker.Library, there shouldn’t be any changes required to the UI or anywhere else.
3. Provide the source code so others can learn from what has been done and make contributions to make it work better or smoother and have it provide a model for people to base their frameworks off of.

So stay tuned because I will be adding more information here as I get closer, should be real soon. I will probably setup the source code on Google code or codeplex, if I do that let me know if you want to make contributions to the project.

Tags: CSLA, NHibernate, StructureMap, TDD