How to Build Microservices with Onion Architecture: Hands-On Experience

Great, we saw how we wired up all of the dependencies of our application. However, there are still a couple of things to take care of. We did not see how to wire up any of our dependencies. But how are we going to use the controller if it is not in the Web application? Well, let us move on to the next section to find out. Great, we have seen how to implement the Presentation layer.

Consequently, each API method is divided into requests and commands. It consists of algorithms that are essential to its purpose and implement the use cases that are the heart of the application. Interfaces define behaviour contracts and stand as foundations amongst the layers. In the future I’d like to explore and write about similar architectures applied to other programming paradigms such as Functional Programming. The very centre of the Model, this layer can have dependencies only on itself. It represents the Entities of the Business and the Behaviour of these Entities.

Organization & Future-proofing Your Code

And in the Startup class/ ConfigureServices method of the WebApi Just Add the following line. You can now see the advantage of this kind of approach. Here we will just Add Mediator to the service collection. We will implement the Mediator pattern later in this tutorial. Next, let’s go to the Infrastructure Folder and add a layer for Database, .

• Just like an onion, your levels are separate layers that do not intermingle, they are their own separate layers of coding.
• These domain entities don’t have any dependencies.
• We are depending on abstractions at compile-time, which gives us strict contracts to work with, and we are being provided with the implementation at runtime.
• Therefore what we do is that we create interfaces in the Application Layer and these interfaces get implemented in the external layers.
• This way anyone in the team mistakenly access the domain entities instead of the corresponding DTO.

Further, the biggest drawback of this architecture is unnecessary coupling that it creates. In this post I am going to talk about Onion Architecture. There are several traditional architectures that exists in web world and each one of the architecture comes with its pros and cons. But most of the traditional architectures raises fundamental issues like tight coupling and separation of concerns. I am going to talk about issues faced with traditional designs and then we will see how Onion Architecture addresses these common issues.

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The object saving behavior is not in the application core, however, because it typically involves a database. Out on the edges we see UI, Infrastructure, and Tests. The outer layer is reserved for things that change often. These things should be intentionally isolated from the application core. Out on the edge, we would find a class that implements a repository interface.

I’ve spoken several times about a specific type of architecture I call Onion Architecture. Onion Architecture is a software application architecture that adheres to the SOLID principles. It uses the dependency injection principle, and it is influenced by the Domain Driven Design and functional https://globalcloudteam.com/ programming principles. Using contracts allows each layer to set its expectations onto the next and couples it to only what it requires to be. The main idea is to use the access modifiers to ensure the architectural constraints. Simon Brown puts all the “use case” related stuff in one package.

ASP.NET Core is designed from the ground to support and leverage dependency injection. Thus, we create generic repository interface for the onion architecture entity operations, so that we can develop loosely coupled application. The code snippet, mentioned below is for the IRepository interface.

Views

I find this pattern to help greatly with Test Driven Development . I often find it easier to drive out business logic code through tests than I do integrated code. It’s the outer-most layer, and keeps peripheral concerns like UI and tests. For a Web application, it represents the Web API or Unit Test project. This layer has an implementation of the dependency injection principle so that the application builds a loosely coupled structure and can communicate to the internal layer via interfaces.

I have a big project to start and wish to write the logic in SQL stored procedures. Stored procedures because we find the easy maintenance and also easy to write the logic. And for this, wish to use ADO.Net without entity framework. These days we have a different idea of what should go in a layer than 30 years ago, and we are more careful about where we put domain logic, presentation logic, and so on. But the architectural principles are all essentially the same.

The flow of dependencies is towards the core of the Onion. We will explain why this is important in the next section. The GET request for the DeleteUser action method returns _DeleteUser partial View. The code snippet mentioned below is under the User folder of Views.

Authentication, Response Wrappers, Error Logging and Job Processing is already covered in my other articles. You can see that we are adding the API Versioning data to the route attribute and also creating an IMediator object. Then, run the following commands to add migrations and to generate/update the database.

The Essence of Onion Architecture

Decoupling the application from the database, file system, etc, lowers the cost of maintenance for the life of the application. Yes, UI is coupled to data access with this approach. Transitive dependencies are still dependencies. The UI can’t function if business logic isn’t there. Business logic can’t function if data access isn’t there. I’m intentionally ignoring infrastructure here because this typically varies from system to system.

It provides better maintainability as all the code depends on deeper layers or the centre. We will use the business domain of a Ride Sharing/Taxi Booking Application. It’s quite straight-forward, just think of Uber or Lyft.

Observability services

We will do a simple test to ensure that our solution works. I will just create a new product and make a request to query all the existing products as well. Just to make our solution a bit clean, let’s also add API Versioning to the WebAPI. Remember we created an IApplicationDBContext Interface in the Application Layer?

Onion architecture implements this concept and dramatically increases code quality, reduces complexity and enables evolutionary enterprise systems. Inward moving, we encounter the Domain Services layer. In this layer is where the majority of our business logic lives, it carries out the operations to turn A into B, input into output, egg into chicken. It achieves this through interacting with the final layer, the Domain Model layer which is the representation of the high level data objects we use.

Briefly about Microservices

The UserController has an action method named EditUser, which returns the view to edit a user. Now, let’s create a repository class to perform database operations on the entity, which implements IRepository. The code snippet is mentioned below for the Repository class under OA.Repo project. This Application uses the Entity Framework Code First approach, so the project OA.Data contains entities that are required in the application’s database. The OA.Data project holds three entities, one is the BaseEntity class that has common properties that will be inherited by each entity. The code snippet, mentioned below is the BaseEntity class.

Presentation Layer

The rider selects their destination, then are presented with an estimated price for their trip. Trip estimation is a business use-case, and it’s the one I’ve selected for our implementation. Figure 2 below outlines the domain within the application structure.

On the contrary, if some functionalities were tightly connected, we had to combine microservices into one. And the most challenging task was to find a balance between all these functions. Based on the DDD model, we’ve created onion architecture . To organize business logic for our project, we used Domain-Driven Design . Various technologies — microservices within a project can be written in various programming languages and technologies.

The Onion Architecture : part 1

I have added the XML file to the root of the API Project. Similarly, create another .NET Standard Library Project in the Core Folder. Do not forget to change the target version here as well. Onion architecture has proven effective to lower coupling and enhancing cohesion.

The architecture is intended to address the challenges faced with traditional architectures and the common problems likecouplingandseparation of concerns. To me, the essence of Onion Architecture is the application of Dependency Inversion Principle with architecturally defined priorities between layers. With layered and hexagonal architectures understood, the time has come to talk about a relative – Onion Architecture, which puts a new spin on layers. Then your outer layer knows how to rectify those problems by asking the APIs or the databases of images, et cetera how to do that. Then in your business logic, you have a function called valid album response. It could be true, false or it could be something like true, then return or a list of problems.