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Exception messages should be aimed at other developers, not end users.

Once in a while, I come across fellow programmers with uncertain understanding of the purpose of exception messages. In my experience, when it comes to writing exception messages, most developers approach the job with one of these mindsets:

• Write the shortest possible exception message; if possible, ignore good grammar, punctuation, and proper spelling.
• Write lovingly crafted error messages for the end users.

Damn the torpedoes #

As far as I can tell, the most common approach to writing error messages is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Apparently, writing a good exception message is such tedious work that a developer can't possibly be bothered with it. Here are some examples:

throw new Exception("Unknown FaileType");

or:

throw new Exception("Unecpected workingDirectory");

These aren't particularly helpful. At the very least, is it too much to ask that they apply correct spelling and punctuation? Would it have been a horrible experience for the developer to write "Unknown FailureType.", or "Unexpected workingDirectory."?

Even if spelling, grammar, and punctuation are corrected, these exception messages aren't particularly helpful to anyone. Fair enough that the FailureType or workingDirectory values were unknown or unexpected, but what were they, then?

If you're seeing such exceptions while working with the code in your IDE, you may be able to attach a debugger and figure out what was the wrong value, but if you're looking at an error log from a production system, you'd really like to know the exact value that was unexpected.

Unfortunately, most developers apparently can't be bothered with supplying even such rudimentary information.

Exception messages for end users? #

Developers who do care about exception messages often seem to have end users in mind. They may spell exception messages correctly, but shy away from providing technical information in the messages, because they are considering the user experience for the end users. They would argue that the "Unknown FailureType" shouldn't be included in the exception message, because it's too technical.

It is, indeed, too technical for end users, but the misconception here is that exception messages should be exposed to end users at all. These developers seems to have a plan for exception handling, which essentially involves catching all exceptions at the boundary of the application, and simply show the exception message to the end user.

That's unlikely to provide a good user experience.

It should be clear that "Unknown FailureType." isn't particularly helpful to a fellow programmer, but it's even more useless to a non-technical end user. Thus, in an effort to shield end users from the technical failure modes of our program, we make exception messages useless to end users and fellow programmers alike.

Security #

Another argument I often encounter is one of security - in this case Information Disclosure. According to the argument, exception messages shouldn't include run-time values, because that may leak information about how the system works. Again, this argument seems to hinge on the implied usage of exception messages shown to end users.

Language #

Exception messages aren't for end users. End users don't speak your language. They don't speak 'Technical'. They may not even speak English. What if your target demographic is all Dutch? Are you going to write all of your exception messages in Dutch? Even if you do, what about exceptions thrown by your Base Class Library or third-party libraries? These are likely to be in English, so if you catch and display all exceptions, you may occasionally display an English message to your Dutch users.

What if your application is designed for a Swiss audience? In which language are you going to write your exception messages? German? French? Italian? Romansh?

Conceptual coupling #

All of the above arguments even implicitly assume that you're writing exception messages for a known system. What if you're writing a reusable library? If you're writing a reusable library, you don't know the context in which it's going to be used. If you don't know the context, then how can you write an appropriate message for an end user?

It should be clear that when writing a reusable library, you're unlikely to know the language of the end user, but it's worse than that: you don't know anything about the end user. You don't even know if there's going to be an end user at all; your library may as well be running inside a batch job.

The converse is true as well. Even if you aren't writing a reusable library, end user-targeted exception messages increases the coupling in the system, because exception messages would be coupled to a particular user interface. This sort of coupling doesn't occur in the type system, but is conceptual. Exactly because it's not tied to any type system, an automated tool can't detect it, so it's much harder to notice, and more insidious as a result.

Exception messages are not for end users. Applications can catch known exception types and translate them to context-aware error messages, but this is a user interface concern - not a technical concern.

Exception messages for client developers #

Now that you understand that exception messages shouldn't be aimed at end users, who's left? Your fellow programmers, including your future self. As I explain in my encapsulation course, exception messages can be used as documentation of the system.

Imagine that you're using a new library that you don't yet know well. Which exception message would you, as a programmer, prefer to encounter?

"Unecpected workingDirectory"

"You tried to provide a working directory string that doesn't represent a working directory. It's not your fault, because it wasn't possible to design the FileStore class in such a way that this is a statically typed pre-condition, but please supply a valid path to an existing directory.

"The invalid value was: "fllobdedy"."

The first type of exception message often make me feel that I suck. The second is mostly an annoyance that my program doesn't work, followed by delight that the object I'm using makes it easy for me to solve my problem.

If you encounter the first exception message, you'll often need to attach a debugger to figure out what was wrong, or at least open the offending code to understand what made it fail. In the second example, the object you're using does its best to provide you with all the information you need in order to solve the problem.

Call to action #

Do write useful exception messages aimed at other developers. Use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Try to phrase the message in a non-blaming way. Supply information about the context or the offending value. If possible, suggest how to resolve the error.

It will take you an extra five minutes to write such an exception message, but will save your colleagues, your clients, and your future self hours of troubleshooting and debugging.

Comments

Some operations take time to perform, and you may want to capture that information. This post describes one way to do it.

Occasionally, you may find yourself in the situation where your software must make a decision based on how much time it has left. Is there time to handle one more message before shutting down? How much time did the last operation take? What was the time when it started?

It can be tempting to simply use DateTime.Now or DateTimeOffset.Now, but the problem is that it couples your code to the machine clock. It also tends to interleave timing logic with other logic, so that it becomes difficult to vary these independently. Incidentally, it also tends to make it difficult to unit test the time-dependent code.

Timed<'a> #

One alternative to DateTimeOffset.Now that I've recently found useful is to define a Timed<'a> generic type, like this:

type Timed<'a> =
    {
        Started : DateTimeOffset
        Stopped : DateTimeOffset
        Result : 'a 
    }
    member this.Duration = this.Stopped - this.Started

A value of Timed<'a> not only carries with it the result of some computation, but also information about when it started and stopped. It also has a calculated property called Duration, which you can use to examine how long the operation took.

Untimed transformations #

Timed<'a> looks like a standard monadic type, and you can also implement standard Bind and Map functions for it:

module Untimed = 
    let bind f x =
        let t = f x.Result
        { t with Started = x.Started }
 
    let map f x =
        { Started = x.Started; Stopped = x.Stopped; Result = f x.Result }

Notice, though, that these functions only transforms the Result (and, in the case of Bind, Stopped), but no actual time measurement is taking place; that's the reason I put both functions in a module called Untimed.

In the case of the Bind function, the time measurement is implicitly taking place when the f function is executed, because it returns a Timed<'b>. In the Map function, on the other hand, no time measurement takes place at all. The function simply maps Result from one value to another using the f function.

So far, I've found no use for the Bind function, and only occasional use for the Untimed.map function. What really matters, after all, is to measure time.

Timing functions #

Ultimately, Timed<'a> is only interesting if you measure the time computations take. Here are a few functions I've found useful to do that:

module Timed =
    let capture clock x =
        let now = clock()
        { Started = now; Stopped = now; Result = x }
 
    let map clock f x =
        let result = f x.Result
        let stopped = clock ()
        { Started = x.Started; Stopped = stopped; Result = result }

Notice that both functions take a clock argument. This is a function with the signature unit -> DateTimeOffset, enabling the capture and map functions to get the time. As the name indicates, the capture function is used to capture a value and 'promote' it to a Timed<'a> value. This value can subsequently be used with the map function to measure the time it took to exectute the f function.

Clocks #

Using the computer's clock is easy:

let machineClock () = DateTimeOffset.Now

As you can tell, this function returns the value of DateTimeOffset.Now every time it's invoked.

You can also implement other clocks, e.g. for unit testing purposes. Here's one (not particularly Functional) way of doing it:

let qlock (q : System.Collections.Generic.Queue<DateTimeOffset>) () =
    q.Dequeue()

Obviously, since this clock is based on a Queue, I decided to call it qlock. Using that, you can define an easier-to-use function based on a sequence of DateTimeOffset values:

let seqlock (l : DateTimeOffset seq) =
    qlock (System.Collections.Generic.Queue<DateTimeOffset>(l))

Here's a fake clock that counts up all the days before Christmas in December (so obviously, I had to name it xlock):

let xlock =
    [1 .. 24]
    |> List.map (fun d -> DateTimeOffset(DateTime(2014, 12, d)))
    |> seqlock

The first time you execute xlock:

(xlock ()).ToString("d")

you get "01.12.2014", the next time you get "02.12.2014", the third time "03.12.2014", and so on.

Such fake clocks are mostly useful for testing, but you could also use them to perform simulations in accelerated time - or perhaps even move time backwards! (Last time I used it, WorldWide Telescope enabled you to look at the solar system in accelerated time. I don't know how that feature is implemented, but it sounds like a good case for a custom clock. The point of this digression is that depending on your application's need, being able to manipulate time may not be as exotic as it first sounds.)

Measuring the time of execution #

These are all the building blocks you need to measure the time it takes to perform an operation. There are various ways to do it, but given a clock of the type unit -> DateTimeOffset, you can close over the clock like this:

let time f x = x |> Timed.capture clock |> Timed.map clock f

The time function has the type ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> Timed<'b>, so, if for example you have a function called readCustomerFromDb of the type int -> Customer option, you can time it like this:

let c = time readCustomerFromDb 42

This might give you a result like this:

{Started = 17.12.2014 11:24:38 +01:00;
 Stopped = 17.12.2014 11:24:39 +01:00;
 Result = Some {Id = 42; Name = "Foo";};}

As you can tell, the result of querying the database for customer 42 is the customer data, as well as information about when the operation started and stopped.

Concluding remarks #

The nice quality of Timed<'a> is that it decouples timing of operations from the result of those operations. This enables you to compose functions without explicitly having to consider how to measure their execution times.

It also helps with unit testing, because if you want to test what happens in a function if a previous function ran on a Sunday, or if it took more than three seconds to run, you can simply create a value of Timed<'a> that captures that information:

let c' = {
    Started = DateTimeOffset(DateTime(2014, 12, 14, 11, 43, 11))
    Stopped = DateTimeOffset(DateTime(2014, 12, 14, 11, 43, 15))
    Result = Some { Id = 1337; Name = "Ploeh" } }

This value can now be used in a unit test to verify the behaviour in that particular case.

In a future post, I will demonstrate how to compose more complex time-sensitive behaviour using Timed<'a> and the associated modules.

This post is number 17 in the 2014 F# Advent Calendar.

Update 2017-05-25: A more recent treatment, including a more realistic usage scenario, is available in the article Type Driven Development.

A type of operation seems to be repeatedly appearing in my code, but I can't figure out what to call it; can you help me?

Across various code bases that I work with, it seems like operations (methods or functions) like these keep appearing:

public IDictionary<string, string> Foo(
    IDictionary<string, string> bar, 
    Baz baz)

In order to keep the example general, I've renamed the method to Foo, and the arguments to bar and baz; in this article throughout, I'll make heavy use of metasyntactic variables. The types involved aren't particularly important; in this example they are IDictionary<string, string> and Baz, but they could be anything. The crux of the matter is that the output type is the same as one of the inputs (in this case, IDictionary<string, string> is both input and output).

Another C# example could be:

public int Qux(int corge, string grault)

Notice that the types involved don't have to be interfaces or complex types. The only recurring motif seems to be that the type of one of the arguments is identical to the return type.

Although the return value shares its type with one of the input arguments, the implementation doesn't have to echo the value as output. In fact, this is often not the case.

At this point, there's also no implicit assumption that the operation is referentially transparent. Thus, we may have implementation where some database is queried. Another possibility is that the operation is a closure over additional values. Here's an F# example:

let sign calculateSignature issuer (expiry : DateTimeOffset) claims =
    claims |> List.append [
        { Type = "signature"; Value = calculateSignature claims }
        { Type = "issuer"; Value = issuer }
        { Type = "expiry"; Value = expiry.ToString "o" }]

You could imagine that the purpose of this function is to sign a set of security claims, by calculating a signature and add this and other issuer claims to the input list of claims. The signature of this particular function is (Claim list -> string) -> string -> DateTimeOffset -> Claim list -> Claim list. However, the leftmost arguments aren't going to vary much, so it would make sense to partially apply the function. Imagine that you have a correctly implemented signature function called calculateHMacSha, and that the name of the issuer should be "Ploeh":

let sign' = sign calculateHMacSha "Ploeh"

The type of the sign' function is DateTimeOffset -> Claim list -> Claim list, which is equivalent to the above Foo and Qux methods.

The question is: What should we call such an operation?

Why care?

In its general form, such an operation would have the shape

public interface IGrault<T1, T2>
{
    T1 Garply(T1 waldo, T2 fred);
}

in C# syntax, or 'a -> 'b -> 'b type in F# syntax.

Why should you care about operations like these?

It turns out that they are rather composable. For instance, it's trivial to implement the Null Object pattern, because you can always simply return the matching argument. Often, it also makes sense to make Composites out of them, or chain them in various ways.

In Functional Programming, you may just do this by composing functions together (while not particularly considering the terminology of what you're doing), but in Object-Oriented languages like C#, we have to name the abstraction before we can use it (because we have to define the type).

If T2 or 'a is a predicate, the operation might be a filter, but as illustrated with the above sign' function, the operation may also enrich the input. In some cases, it may even replace the original input and return a completely different value (of the same type). Thus, such an operation could be a 'filter', an 'expansion', or a 'replacement'; those are quite vague properties, so any name for such operations are likely to be vague or broad as well.

My question to you is: what do we call this type of operation?

While I do have a short-list of candidate names, I encounter these constructs so often that I'd be surprised if such operations don't already have a conceptual name. If so, what is it? If not, what should we call them?

(I'd hoped that this type of operation was already a 'thing' in functional programming, so I asked on Twitter, but the context is often lost on Twitter, so therefore this blog post.)

Comments

The IsNullOrWhiteSpace method may seem like a useful utility method, but poisons your design perspective.

The string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method, together with its older sibling string.IsNullOrEmpty, may seem like useful utility methods. In reality, they aren't. In fact, they trick your mind into thinking that null is equivalent to white space, which it isn't.

Null isn't equivalent to anything; it's the absence of a value.

Various empty and white space strings ("", " ", etc), on the other hand, are values, although, perhaps, not particularly interesting values.

Example: search canonicalization #

Imagine that you have to write a simple search canonicalization algorithm for a music search service. The problem you're trying to solve is that when users search for music, the may use variations of upper and lower case letters, as well as type the artist name before the song title, or vice versa. In order to make your system as efficient as possible, you may want to cache popular search results, but it means that you'll need to transform each search term into a canonical form.

In order to keep things simple, let's assume that you only need to convert all letters to upper case, and order words alphabetically.

Here are five test cases, represented as a Parameterized Test:

[Theory]
[InlineData("Seven Lions Polarized"  , "LIONS POLARIZED SEVEN"  )]
[InlineData("seven lions polarized"  , "LIONS POLARIZED SEVEN"  )]
[InlineData("Polarized seven lions"  , "LIONS POLARIZED SEVEN"  )]
[InlineData("Au5 Crystal Mathematics", "AU5 CRYSTAL MATHEMATICS")]
[InlineData("crystal mathematics au5", "AU5 CRYSTAL MATHEMATICS")]
public void CanonicalizeReturnsCorrectResult(
    string searchTerm,
    string expected)
{
    string actual = SearchTerm.Canonicalize(searchTerm);
    Assert.Equal(expected, actual);
}

Here's one possible implementation that passes all five test cases:

public static string Canonicalize(string searchTerm)
{
    return searchTerm
        .Split(new[] { ' ' })
        .Select(x => x.ToUpper())
        .OrderBy(x => x)
        .Aggregate((x, y) => x + " " + y);
}

This implementation uses the space character to split the string into an array, then converts each sub-string to upper case letters, sorts the sub-strings in ascending order, and finally concatenates them all together to a single string, which is returned.

Continued example: making the implementation more robust #

The above implementation is quite naive, because it doesn't properly canonicalize if the user entered extra white space, such as in these extra test cases:

[InlineData("Seven  Lions   Polarized", "LIONS POLARIZED SEVEN")]
[InlineData(" Seven  Lions Polarized ", "LIONS POLARIZED SEVEN")]

Notice that these new test cases don't pass with the above implementation, because it doesn't properly remove all the white spaces. Here's a more robust implementation that passes all test cases:

public static string Canonicalize(string searchTerm)
{
    return searchTerm
        .Split(new[] { ' ' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
        .Select(x => x.ToUpper())
        .OrderBy(x => x)
        .Aggregate((x, y) => x + " " + y);
}

Notice the addition of StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries.

Testing for null #

If you consider the above implementation, does it have any other problems?

One, fairly obvious, problem is that if searchTerm is null, the method is going to throw a NullReferenceException, because you can't invoke the Split method on null.

Therefore, in order to protect the invariants of the method, you must test for null:

[Fact]
public void CanonicalizeNullThrows()
{
    Assert.Throws<ArgumentNullException>(
        () => SearchTerm.Canonicalize(null));
}

In this case, you've decided that null is simply invalid input, and I agree. Searching for null (the absence of a value) isn't meaningful; it must be a defect in the calling code.

Often, I see programmers implement their null checks like this:

public static string Canonicalize(string searchTerm)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchTerm))
        throw new ArgumentNullException("searchTerm");
 
    return searchTerm
        .Split(new[] { ' ' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
        .Select(x => x.ToUpper())
        .OrderBy(x => x)
        .Aggregate((x, y) => x + " " + y);
}

Notice the use of IsNullOrWhiteSpace. While it passes all tests so far, it's wrong for a number of reasons.

Problems with IsNullOrWhiteSpace #

The first problem with this use of IsNullOrWhiteSpace is that it may give client programmers wrong messages. For example, if you pass the empty string ("") as searchTerm, you'll still get an ArgumentNullException. This is misleading, because it gives the wrong message: it states that searchTerm was null when it wasn't (it was "").

You may then argue that you could change the implementation to throw an ArgumentException.

if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchTerm))
    throw new ArgumentException("Empty or null.", "searchTerm");

This isn't incorrect per se, but not as explicit as it could have been. In other words, it's not as helpful to the client developer as it could have been. While it may not seem like a big deal in a single method like this, it's sloppy code like this that eventually wear client developers down; it's death by a thousand paper cuts.

Moreover, this implementation doesn't follow the Robustness Principle. Is there any rational reason to reject white space strings?

Actually, with a minor tweak, we can make the implementation work with white space as well. Consider these new test cases:

[InlineData("", "")]
[InlineData(" ", "")]
[InlineData("  ", "")]

These currently fail because of the use of IsNullOrWhiteSpace, but they ought to succeed.

The correct implementation of the Canonicalize method is this:

public static string Canonicalize(string searchTerm)
{
    if (searchTerm == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException("searchTerm");
 
    return searchTerm
        .Split(new[] { ' ' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
        .Select(x => x.ToUpper())
        .OrderBy(x => x)
        .Aggregate("", (x, y) => x + " " + y)
        .Trim();
}

First of all, the correct Guard Clause is to test only for null; null is the only invalid value. Second, the method uses another overload of the Aggregate method where an initial seed (in this case "") is used to initialize the Fold operation. Third, the final call to the Trim method ensures that there's no leading or trailing white space.

The IsNullOrWhiteSpace mental model #

The overall problem with IsNullOrWhiteSpace and IsNullOrEmpty is that they give you the impression that null is equivalent to white space strings. This is the wrong mental model: white space strings are proper string values that you can very often manipulate just as well as any other string.

If you insist on the mental model that white space strings are equivalent to null, you'll tend to put them in the same bucket of 'invalid' data. However, if you take a hard look at the preconditions for your classes, methods, or functions, you'll find that often, a white space string is going to be perfectly acceptable input. Why reject input you can understand? That will only make your code more difficult to use.

In testing terms, it's my experience that null rarely falls in the same Equivalence Class as white space strings. Therefore, it's wrong to implicitly treat them as if they do.

The IsNullOrWhiteSpace and IsNullOrEmpty methods imply that null and white space strings are equivalent, and this will often give you the wrong mental model of the boundary cases of your software. Be careful when using these methods.

Comments

  if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchTerm)) //this is not the part that is wrong (in this context*)
    throw new ArgumentNullException("searchTerm");  //this is
        

  if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchTerm))
  {
    throw new ArgumentException("A search term must be provided");
  }
        

  public static string NullIfWhiteSpace(this string value)
  {
      return string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(value) ? null : value;
  }
      

                
  public static string Canonicalize(string searchTerm)
  {
    _ = searchTerm.NullIfWhiteSpace() ?? throw new ArgumentException("A search term must be provided");
    // etc...
      

How do you comprehensibly unit test two methods that are supposed to have the same behaviour?

Occasionally, you may find yourself in situations where you need to have two (or more) public methods with the same behaviour. How do you properly cover them with unit tests?

The obvious answer is to copy and paste all the tests, but that leads to test duplication. People with a superficial knowledge of DAMP (Descriptive And Meaningful Phrases) would argue that test duplication isn't a problem, but it is, simply because it's more code that you need to maintain.

Another approach may be to simply ignore one of those methods, effectively not testing it, but if you're writing Wildlife Software, you have to have mechanisms in place that can protect you from introducing breaking changes.

This article outlines one approach you can use if your unit testing framework supports Parameterized Tests.

Example problem #

Recently, I was working on a class with a complex AppendAsync method:

public Task AppendAsync(T @event)
{
    // Lots of stuff going on here...
}

To incrementally define the behaviour of that AppendAsync method, I had used Test-Driven Development to implement it, ending with 13 test methods. None of those test methods were simple one-liners; they ranged from 3 to 18 statements, and averaged 8 statements per test.

After having fully implemented the AppendAsync method, I wanted to make the containing class implement IObserver<T>, with the OnNext method implemented like this:

public void OnNext(T value)
{
    this.AppendAsync(value).Wait();
}

That was my plan, but how could I provide appropriate coverage with unit tests of that OnNext implementation, given that I didn't want to copy and paste those 13 test methods?

Parameterized Tests with varied behaviour #

In this code base, I was already using xUnit.net with its nice support for Parameterized Tests; in fact, I was using AutoFixture.Xunit with attribute-based test input, so my tests looked like this:

[Theory, AutoAtomData]
public void AppendAsyncFirstEventWritesPageBeforeIndex(
    [Frozen(As = typeof(ITypeResolver))]TestEventTypeResolver dummyResolver,
    [Frozen(As = typeof(IContentSerializer))]XmlContentSerializer dummySerializer,
    [Frozen(As = typeof(IAtomEventStorage))]SpyAtomEventStore spyStore,
    AtomEventObserver<XmlAttributedTestEventX> sut,
    XmlAttributedTestEventX @event)
{
    sut.AppendAsync(@event).Wait();
 
    var feed = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<AtomFeed>(
        spyStore.ObservedArguments.Last());
    Assert.Equal(sut.Id, feed.Id);
}

This is the sort of test I needed to duplicate, but instead of calling sut.AppendAsync(@event).Wait(); I needed to call sut.OnNext(@event);. The only variation in the test should be in the exercise SUT phase of the test. How can you do that, while maintaining the terseness of using attributes for defining test cases? The problem with using attributes is that you can only supply primitive values as input.

First, I briefly experimented with applying the Template Method pattern, and while I got it working, I didn't like having to rely on inheritance. Instead, I devised this little, test-specific type hierarchy:

public interface IAtomEventWriter<T>
{
    void WriteTo(AtomEventObserver<T> observer, T @event);
}
 
public enum AtomEventWriteUsage
{
    AppendAsync = 0,
    OnNext
}
 
public class AppendAsyncAtomEventWriter<T> : IAtomEventWriter<T>
{
    public void WriteTo(AtomEventObserver<T> observer, T @event)
    {
        observer.AppendAsync(@event).Wait();
    }
}
 
public class OnNextAtomEventWriter<T> : IAtomEventWriter<T>
{
    public void WriteTo(AtomEventObserver<T> observer, T @event)
    {
        observer.OnNext(@event);
    }
}
 
public class AtomEventWriterFactory<T>
{
    public IAtomEventWriter<T> Create(AtomEventWriteUsage use)
    {
        switch (use)
        {
            case AtomEventWriteUsage.AppendAsync:
                return new AppendAsyncAtomEventWriter<T>();
            case AtomEventWriteUsage.OnNext:
                return new OnNextAtomEventWriter<T>();
            default:
                throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("Unexpected value.");
        }
    }
}

This is test-specific code that I added to my unit tests, so there's no test-induced damage here. These types are defined in the unit test library, and are not available in the SUT library at all.

Notice that I defined an interface to abstract how to use the SUT for this particular test purpose. There are two small classes implementing that interface: one using AppendAsync, and one using OnNext. However, this small polymorphic type hierarchy can't be supplied from attributes, so I also added an enum, and a concrete factory to translate from the enum to the writer interface.

This test-specific type system enabled me to refactor my unit tests to something like this:

[Theory]
[InlineAutoAtomData(AtomEventWriteUsage.AppendAsync)]
[InlineAutoAtomData(AtomEventWriteUsage.OnNext)]
public void WriteFirstEventWritesPageBeforeIndex(
    AtomEventWriteUsage usage,
    [Frozen(As = typeof(ITypeResolver))]TestEventTypeResolver dummyResolver,
    [Frozen(As = typeof(IContentSerializer))]XmlContentSerializer dummySerializer,
    [Frozen(As = typeof(IAtomEventStorage))]SpyAtomEventStore spyStore,
    AtomEventWriterFactory<XmlAttributedTestEventX> writerFactory,
    AtomEventObserver<XmlAttributedTestEventX> sut,
    XmlAttributedTestEventX @event)
{
    writerFactory.Create(usage).WriteTo(sut, @event);
 
    var feed = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<AtomFeed>(
        spyStore.ObservedArguments.Last());
    Assert.Equal(sut.Id, feed.Id);
}

Notice that this is the same test case as before, but because of the two occurrences of the [InlineAutoAtomData] attribute, each test method is being executed twice: once with AppendAsync, and once with OnNext.

This gave me coverage, and protection against breaking changes of both methods, without making any test-induced damage.

The entire source code in this article is available here. The commit just before the refactoring is this one, and the commit with the completed refactoring is this one.

Comments

Announcing AtomEventStore: an open source, server-less .NET Event Store.

Grean has kindly open-sourced a library we've used internally for several projects: AtomEventStore. It's pretty nice, if I may say so.

It comes with quite a bit of documentation, and is also available on NuGet.

The original inspiration came from Yves Reynhout's article Your EventStream is a linked list.

How to (almost) continuously poll a queue when you can only run a task at discrete intervals.

In a previous article, I described how you set up Azure Web Jobs to run only a single instance of a background process. However, the shortest time interval you can currently configure is to run a scheduled task every minute. If you want to use this trick to set up a Polling Consumer, it may seem limiting that you'll have to wait up to a minute before the scheduled task can pull new messages off the queue.

The problem #

The problem is this: a Web Job is a command-line executable you can schedule. The most frequent schedule you can set up is once per minute. Thus, once per minute, the executable can start and query a queue in order to see if there are new messages since it last looked.

If there are new messages, it can pull these messages off the queue and handle them one by one, until the queue is empty.

If there are no new messages, the executable exits. It will then be up to a minute before it will run again. This means that if a message arrives just after the executable exits, it will sit in the queue up to a minute before being handled.

At least, that's the naive implementation.

A more sophisticated approach #

Instead of exiting immediately, what if the executable was to wait for a small period, and then check again? This means that you'd be able to increase the polling frequency to run much faster than once per minute.

If the executable also keeps track of when it started, it can gracefully exit slightly before the minute is up, enabling the task scheduler to start a new process soon after.

Example: a recursive F# implementation #

You can implement the above strategy in any language. Here's an F# version. The example code below is the main 'loop' of the program, but a few things have been put into place before that. Most of these are configuration values pulled from the configuration system:

• timeout is a TimeSpan value that specifies for how long the executable should run before exiting. This value comes from the configuration system. Since the minimum schedule frequency for Azure Web Jobs is 1 minute, it makes sense to set this value to 1 minute.
• stopBefore is essentially DateTimeOffset.Now + timeout.
• estimatedDuration is a TimeSpan containing your (conservative) estimate of how long time it takes to handle a single message. It's only used if there are no messages to be handled in the queue, as the algorithm then has no statistics about the average execution time for each message. This value comes from the configuration system. In a recent system, I just arbitrarily set it to 2 seconds.
• toleranceFactor is a decimal used as a multiplier in order to produce a margin for when the executable should exit, so that it can exit before stopBefore, instead of idling for too long. This value comes from the configuration system. You'll have to experiment a bit with this value. When I originally deployed the code below, I had it set to 2, but it seems like the Azure team changed how Web Jobs are initialized, so currently I have it set to 5.
• idleTime is a TimeSpan that controls how long the executable should sit idly waiting, if there are no messages in the queue. This value comes from the configuration system. In a recent system, I set it to 5 seconds, which means that you may experience up to 5 seconds delay from a message arrives on an empty queue, until it's picked up and handled.
• dequeue is the function that actually pulls a message off the queue. It has the signature unit -> (unit -> unit) option. That looks pretty weird, but it means that it's a function that takes no input arguments. If there's a message in the queue, it returns a handler function, which is used to handle the message; otherwise, it returns None.

let rec handleUntilTimedOut (durations : TimeSpan list) =
    let avgDuration =
        match durations with
        | [] -> estimatedDuration
        | _ ->
            (durations |> List.sumBy (fun x -> x.Ticks)) /
                (int64 durations.Length)
            |> TimeSpan.FromTicks
    let margin =
        (decimal avgDuration.Ticks) * toleranceFactor
        |> int64
        |> TimeSpan.FromTicks
 
    if DateTimeOffset.Now + margin < stopBefore then
        match dequeue() with
        | Some handle ->
            let before = DateTimeOffset.Now
            handle()
            let after = DateTimeOffset.Now
            let duration = after - before
            let newDurations = duration :: durations
            handleUntilTimedOut newDurations
        | _ ->
            if DateTimeOffset.Now + idleTime < stopBefore then
                Async.Sleep (int idleTime.TotalMilliseconds)
                |> Async.RunSynchronously
                handleUntilTimedOut durations
 
handleUntilTimedOut []

As you can see, the first thing the handleUntilTimedOut function does is to attempt to calculate the average duration of handling a message. Calculating the average is easy enough if you have at least one observation, but if you have no observations at all, you can't calculate the average. This is the reason the algorithm needs the estimatedDuration to get started.

Based on the the average (or estimated) duration, the algorithm next calculates a safety margin. This margin is intended to give the executable a chance to exit in time: if it can see that it's getting too close to the timeout, it'll exit instead of attempting to handle another message, since handling another message may take so much time that it may push it over the timeout limit.

If it decides that, based on the margin, it still have time to handle a message, it'll attempt to dequeue a message.

If there's a message, it'll measure the time it takes to handle the message, and then append the measured duration to the list of already observed durations, and recursively call itself.

If there's no message in the queue, the algorithm will idle for the configured period, and then call itself recursively.

Finally, the handleUntilTimedOut [] expression kicks off the polling cycle with an empty list of observed durations.

Observations #

When appropriately configured, a typical Azure Web Job log sequence looks like this:

• 1 minute ago (55 seconds running time)
• 2 minutes ago (55 seconds running time)
• 3 minutes ago (56 seconds running time)
• 4 minutes ago (55 seconds running time)
• 5 minutes ago (56 seconds running time)
• 6 minutes ago (58 seconds running time)
• 7 minutes ago (55 seconds running time)
• 8 minutes ago (55 seconds running time)
• 9 minutes ago (58 seconds running time)
• 10 minutes ago (56 seconds running time)

Summary #

If you have a situation where you need to run a scheduled job (as opposed to a continuously running service or daemon), but you want it to behave like it was a continuously running service, you can make it wait until just before a new scheduled job is about to start, and then exit. This is an approach you can use anywhere you find yourself in that situation - not only on Azure.

Update 2015 August 11: See my article about Type Driven Development for an example of how to approach this problem in a well-designed, systematic, iterative fashion.

Comments

open System.Threading
  open System.Threading.Tasks

  module Scheduler =
      let run job (period : TimeSpan) =
          // Start
          let cancellationTokenSource =
              new CancellationTokenSource()

          (new Task(fun () ->
              let token = cancellationTokenSource.Token
              while not token.IsCancellationRequested do
                  job()
                  token.WaitHandle.WaitOne period |> ignore)).Start()

          // Loop
          Console.WriteLine
              "Scheduler running. Type \"quit\" or \"exit\" to stop."
          let stop =
              let line = Console.ReadLine().ToUpperInvariant()
              line = "QUIT" || line = "EXIT"
          while not stop do ()

          // Stop
          cancellationTokenSource.Cancel()

  module Main =
      let job () =
          Console.Write "[."
          Async.Sleep 1000 |> Async.RunSynchronously
          Console.WriteLine ".] - OK"

      Scheduler.run job (TimeSpan.FromSeconds 0.5)
  

How to release objects from within a Decoraptor.

In my article about the Decoraptor design pattern, I deliberately ignored the question of decommissioning: what if the short-lived object created inside of the Decoraptor contains one or more disposable objects?

A Decoraptor creates instances of object graphs, and such object graphs may contain disposable objects. These disposable objects may be deeply buried inside of the object graph, and the root object itself may not implement IDisposable.

This is a know problem, and the solution is known as well: the object that composes the object graph is the only object with enough knowledge to dispose of any disposable objects within the object graph that it created, so an Abstract Factory should also be able to release objects again:

public interface IFactory<T>
{
    T Create();
 
    void Release(T item);
}

This is similar to advice I've already given in conjunction with designing DI-Friendly frameworks.

Example: refactored Decoraptor #

With the new version of the IFactory<T> interface, you can refactor the Observeraptor class from the Decoraptor article:

public class Observeraptor<T> : IObserver<T>
{
    private readonly IFactory<IObserver<T>> factory;
 
    public Observeraptor(IFactory<IObserver<T>> factory)
    {
        this.factory = factory;
    }
 
    public void OnCompleted()
    {
        var obs = this.factory.Create();
        obs.OnCompleted();
        this.factory.Release(obs);
    }
 
    public void OnError(Exception error)
    {
        var obs = this.factory.Create();
        obs.OnError(error);
        this.factory.Release(obs);
    }
 
    public void OnNext(T value)
    {
        var obs = this.factory.Create();
        obs.OnNext(value);
        this.factory.Release(obs);
    }
}

As you can see, each method implementation now performs three steps:

1. Use the factory to create an instance of IObserver<T>
2. Delegate the method call to the new instance
3. Release the short-lived instance

Some people prefer letting the factory return something that implements IDisposable, so that the Decoraptor can employ a using statement in order to manage the lifetime of the returned object. However, IObserver<T> itself doesn't derive from IDisposable, so if you want to do something like that, you'd need to invent some sort of Scope<T> class, which would implement IDisposable; that's another alternative.

Example: refactored factory #

Refactoring the Decoraptor itself to take decommissioning into account is fairly easy, but you also need to implement the Release method on any factory implementations. Furthermore, the factory should be thread-safe, because often, the entire point of introducing a Decoraptor in the first place is to deal with Services that aren't thread-safe.

Implementing a thread-safe Composer isn't too difficult, but certainly increases the complexity of it:

public class SqlMeterFactory : IFactory<IObserver<MeterRecord>>
{
    private readonly
        ConcurrentDictionary<IObserver<MeterRecord>, MeteringContext>
            observers;
 
    public SqlMeterFactory()
    {
        this.observers = new
            ConcurrentDictionary<IObserver<MeterRecord>, MeteringContext>();
    }
 
    public IObserver<MeterRecord> Create()
    {
        var ctx = new MeteringContext();
        var obs = new SqlMeter(ctx);
 
        this.observers[obs] = ctx;
 
        return obs;
    }
 
    public void Release(IObserver<MeterRecord> item)
    {
        MeteringContext ctx;
        if (this.observers.TryRemove(item, out ctx))
            ctx.Dispose();
    }
}

Fortunately, instead of having to handle the complexity of a thread-safe implementation, you can delegate that part to a ConcurrentDictionary.

Disposable graphs #

The astute reader may have been wondering about this: shouldn't SqlMeter implement IDisposable? And if so, wouldn't it be easier to simply dispose of it directly, instead of having to deal with a dictionary of root objects as keys, and disposable objects as values?

The short answer is that, in this particular example, this would indeed have been a more correct, as well as a simpler, solution. Consider the SqlMeter class:

public class SqlMeter : IObserver<MeterRecord>
{
    private readonly MeteringContext ctx;
 
    public SqlMeter(MeteringContext ctx)
    {
        this.ctx = ctx;
    }
 
    public void OnNext(MeterRecord value)
    {
        this.ctx.Records.Add(value);
        this.ctx.SaveChanges();
    }
 
    public void OnCompleted() { }
 
    public void OnError(Exception error) { }
}

Since SqlMeter has a class field of the type MeteringContext, and MeteringContext, via deriving from DbContext, is a disposable object, SqlMeter itself also ought to implement IDisposable.

Yes, indeed, it should, and the only reason I didn't do that was for the sake of the example. If SqlMeter had implemented IDisposable, you'd be tempted to implement SqlMeterFactory.Release by simply attempting to downcast the incoming item from IObserver<MeterRecord> to IDisposable, and then, if the cast succeeds, invoke its Dispose method.

However, the only reason we know that SqlMeter ought to implement IDisposable is because it has a concrete dependency. Concrete types can implement IDisposable, but interfaces should not, since IDisposable is an implementation detail. (I do realize that some interfaces defined by the .NET Base Class Library derives from IDisposable, but I consider those Leaky Abstractions. As Nicholas Blumhardt put it: "an interface [...] generally shouldn't be disposable. There's no way for the one defining an interface to foresee all possible implementations of it - you can always come up with a disposable implementation of practically any interface.")

The point of this discussion is that as soon as a class has an abstract dependency (as opposed to a concrete dependency), the class may or may not be relying on something that is disposable. That's not enough to warrant the class itself to implement the IDisposable interface. For this reason, when an Abstract Factory creates an object graph, the root object of that graph should rarely implement IDisposable, and that's the reason it's not enough to attempt a downcast.

This was the reason that I intentionally didn't implement IDisposable on SqlMeter, even though I should have: to demonstrate how a Release method should deal with object graphs where the disposable objects are deeply buried as leaf nodes in the graph. A Release method may not always be able to traverse the graph, so this is the reason that the factory must also have the decommissioning responsibility: only the Composer knows what it composed, so only it knows how to safely dismantle the graph again.

Summary #

Throwing IDisposable into the mix always makes things much more complicated, so if you can, try to implement your classes in such a way that they aren't disposable. This is often possible, but if you can't avoid it, you must add a Release method to your Abstract Factory and handle the additional complexity of decommissioning object graphs.

Some (but not all!) DI Containers already do this, so that may be one reason to use a DI Container.

A Dependency Injection design pattern

This article describes a Dependency Injection design pattern called Decoraptor. It can be used as a solution to the problem:

How can you address lifetime mismatches without introducing a Leaky Abstraction?

By adding a combination of a Decorator and Adapter between the Client and its Service.

Sometimes, when a Client wishes to talk to a Service (Component in the figure; in practice often an interface), the Client may have a long lifetime, whereas, because of technical constraints in the implementation, the Service must only have a short lifetime. If not addressed, this may lead to a Captive Dependency: the long-lived Client holds onto the Service for too long.

One solution to this is a Decoraptor - a combination of a Decorator and an Adapter. A Decoraptor is a long-lived object that adapts an Abstract Factory, and uses the factory to create a short-lived instance of the interface that it, itself, implements.

How it works #

A Decoraptor is an Adapter that looks almost like a Decorator. It implements an interface (Component in the above figure) by adapting an Abstract Factory. The factory creates other instances of the implemented interface, so the Decoraptor implements each operation defined by the interface by

1. Invoking the factory to create a new instance of the same interface
2. Delegating the operation to the new instance

While not strictly a Decorator, a Decoraptor is closely related because it ultimately delegates all implementation to another implementation of the interface it, itself, implements. The only purpose of a Decoraptor is to match two otherwise incompatible lifetimes.

When to use it #

While a Decoraptor is a fairly simple piece of infrastructure code, it still adds complexity to a code base, so it should only be used if necessary. The simplest solution to the Captive Dependency problem is to align the Client's lifetime to the Service's lifetime; in other words, make the Client's lifetime as short as the Service's lifetime. This doesn't require a Decoraptor: it only requires you to compose the Client/Service object graph every time you want to create a new instance of the Service.

Another alternative to a Decoraptor is to consider whether it's possible to refactor the Service so that it can have a longer lifetime. Often, the reason why a Service should have a short life span is because it isn't thread-safe. Sometimes, making a Service thread-safe isn't that difficult; in such cases, this may be a better solution (but sometimes, making something thread-safe is extremely difficult, in which case Decoraptor may be a much simpler solution).

Still, there may be cases where creating a new Client every time you want to use it isn't desirable, or even possible. The most common concern is often performance, although in my experience, that's rarely a real problem. More substantial is a concern that sometimes, due to technical constraints, it isn't possible to make the Client shorter-lived. In these cases, a Decoraptor is a good solution.

A Decoraptor is a better alternative to injecting an Abstract Factory directly into the Client, because doing that is a Leaky Abstraction. The Client is programming against an interface, and, according to the Dependency Inversion Principle,

"clients [...] own the abstract interfaces"

- Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices, chapter 11

Implementation details #

Let the Client define the interface it needs, without taking lifetime issues into consideration. Implement the interface in a separate class, again disregarding specific lifetime issues.

Define an Abstract Factory that creates new instances of the interface required by the Client. Create a new class that implements the interface, but takes the factory as a dependency. This is the Decoraptor. In the Decoraptor, implement each method by invoking the factory to create the short-lived instance of the interface, and delegate the method implementation to that instance.

Create a class that implements the Abstract Factory by creating new instances of the short-lived Service.

Inject the factory into the Decoraptor, and inject the Decoraptor into the long-lived Client. The Decoraptor has the same lifetime as the Client, but each Service instance only exists for the duration of a single method call.

Motivating example #

When using Passive Attributes with ASP.NET Web API, the Filter containing all the behaviour must be added to the overall collection of Filters:

var filter = new MeteringFilter(observer);
config.Filters.Add(filter);

Due to the way ASP.NET Web API works, this configuration happens during Application_Start, so there's only going to be a single instance of MeteringFilter around. In other work, the MeteringFilter is a long-lived Client; it effectively has Singleton lifetime scope.

MeteringFilter depends on IObserver<MeterRecord> (See the article about Passive Attributes for the full code of MeteringFilter). The observer injected into the MeteringFilter object will have the same lifetime as the MeteringFilter object. The Filter will be used from concurrent threads, and while MeteringFilter itself is thread-safe (it has immutable state), the injected observer may not be.

To be more concrete, this question was recently posted on Stack Overflow:

"The filter I'm implementing has a dependency on a repository, which itself has a dependency on a custom DbContext. [...] I'm not sure how to implement this, while taking advantage of the DI container's lifetime management capabilities (so that a new DbContext will be used per request)."

public class SqlMeter : IObserver<MeterRecord>
{
    private readonly MeteringContext ctx;
 
    public SqlMeter(MeteringContext ctx)
    {
        this.ctx = ctx;
    }
 
    public void OnNext(MeterRecord value)
    {
        this.ctx.Records.Add(value);
        this.ctx.SaveChanges();
    }
 
    public void OnCompleted() { }
 
    public void OnError(Exception error) { }
}

The SqlMeter class here takes the place of the Service in the more abstract language used above. In the Stack Overflow question, it sounds like there's a Repository between the Client and the DbContext, but I think this example captures the essence of the problem.

This is exactly the issue outlined above. Due to technical constraints, the MeteringFilter must be a Singleton, while (again due to technical constraints) each Observer must be either Transient or scoped to each request.

Refactoring notes #

In order to resolve a problem like the example above, you can introduce a Decoraptor, which sits between the Client (MeteringFilter) and the Service (SqlMeter). The Decoraptor relies on an Abstract Factory to create new instances of SqlMeter:

public interface IFactory<T>
{
    T Create();
}

In this case, the Abstract Factory is a generic interface, but it could also be a non-generic interface that only creates instances of IObserver<MeterRecord>. Some people prefer delegates instead, so would use e.g. Func<IObserver<MeterRecord>>. You could also define an Abstract Base Class instead of an interface, if that's more to your liking.

This particular example also disregards decommissioning concerns. Effectively, the Abstract Factory will create instances of SqlMeter, but since these instances simply go out of scope, the contained MeteringContext isn't being disposed of in a deterministic manner. In a future article, I will remedy this situation.

Example: generic Decoraptor for Observers #

In order to resolve the lifetime mismatch between MeteringFilter and SqlMeter you can introduce a generic Decoraptor:

public class Observeraptor<T> : IObserver<T>
{
    private readonly IFactory<IObserver<T>> factory;
 
    public Observeraptor(IFactory<IObserver<T>> factory)
    {
        this.factory = factory;
    }
 
    public void OnCompleted()
    {
        this.factory.Create().OnCompleted();
    }
 
    public void OnError(Exception error)
    {
        this.factory.Create().OnError(error);
    }
 
    public void OnNext(T value)
    {
        this.factory.Create().OnNext(value);
    }
}

Notice that Observeraptor<T> can adapt any IObserver<T> because it depends on the generic IFactory<IObserver<T>> interface. In each method defined by IObserver<T>, it first uses the factory to create an instance of a short-lived IObserver<T>, and then delegates the implementation to that object.

Since MeteringFilter depends on IObserver<MeterRecord>, you also need an implementation of IFactory<IObserver<MeterRecord>> in order to compose the MeteringFilter object graph:

public class SqlMeterFactory : IFactory<IObserver<MeterRecord>>
{
    public IObserver<MeterRecord> Create()
    {
        return new SqlMeter(new MeteringContext());
    }
}

This implementation simply creates a new instance of SqlMeter and MeteringContext every time the Create method is invoked; hardly surprising, I should hope.

You now have all building blocks to correctly compose MeteringFilter in Application_Start:

var factory = new SqlMeterFactory();
var observer = new Observeraptor<MeterRecord>(factory);
var filter = new MeteringFilter(observer);
config.Filters.Add(filter);

Because SqlMeterFactory creates new instances of SqlMeter every time MeteringFilter invokes IObserver<MeterRecord>.OnNext, the lifetime requirements of the DbContext are satisfied. Moreover, MeteringFilter only depends on IObserver<MeterRecord>, so is perfectly shielded from that implementation detail, so no Leaky Abstraction was introduced.

Known examples #

Questions related to the issue of lifetime mismatches are regularly being asked on Stack Overflow, and I've had a bit of success recommending Decoraptor as a solution, although at that time, I had yet to come up with the name:

• Dependency Injection - new instance required in several of a classes methods
• IOC DI Multi-Threaded Lifecycle Scoping in Background Tasks

Comments

How can you both follow Command Query Separation and assign unique IDs to Entities when you save them? This post examines some options.

In my Encapsulation and SOLID Pluralsight course, I explain why Command Query Separation (CQS) is an important component of Encapsulation. When first exposed to CQS, many people start to look for edge cases, so a common question is something like this:

What would you do if you had a service that saves to a database and returns the ID (which is set by the database)? The Save operation is a Command, but if it returns void, how do I get the ID?

Typical, CQS-violating design #

The problem is that in many code bases, you occasionally need to save a brand-new Entity to persistent storage. Since the object is an Entity (as defined in Domain-Driven Design), it must have a unique ID. If your system is a concurrent system, you can't just pick a number and expect it to be unique... or can you?

Instead, many programmers rely on their underlying database to add a unique ID to the Entity when it saves it, and then return the ID to the client. Accordingly, they introduce designs like this:

public interface IRepository<T>
{
    int Create(T item);
 
    // other members
}

The problem with this design, obviously, is that it violates CQS. The Create method ought to be a Command, but it returns a value. From the perspective of Encapsulation, this is problematic, because if we look only at the method signature, we could be tricked into believing that since it returns a value, the Create method is a Query, and therefore has no side-effects - which it clearly has. That makes it difficult to reason about the code.

It's also a leaky abstraction, because most developers or architects implicitly rely on a database implementation to provide the ID. What if an implementation doesn't have the ability to come up with a unique ID? This sounds like a Liskov Substitution Principle violation just waiting to happen!

The easiest solution #

When I wrote "you can't just pick a number and expect it to be unique", I almost gave away the easiest solution to this problem:

public interface IRepository<T>
{
    void Create(Guid id, T item);
 
    // other members
}

Just change the ID from an integer to a GUID (or UUID, if you prefer). This does enable clients to come up with a unique ID for the Entity - after all, that's the whole point of GUIDs.

Notice how, in this alternative design, the Create method returns void, making it a proper Command. From an encapsulation perspective, this is important because it enables you to immediately identify that this is a method with side-effects - just by looking at the method signature.

But wait: what if you do need the ID to be an integer? That's not a problem; there's also a solution for that.

A solution with integer IDs #

You may not like the easy solution above, but it is a good solution that fits in a wide variety in situations. Still, there can be valid reasons that using a GUID isn't an acceptable solution:

• Some databases (e.g. SQL Server) don't particularly like if you use GUIDs as table keys. You can, but integer keys often perform better, and they are also shorter.
• Sometimes, the Entity ID isn't only for internal use. Once, I worked on a customer support ticket system, and my suggestion of using a GUID as an ID wasn't met with enthusiasm. When a customer calls on the phone about an existing support case, it isn't reasonable to ask him or her to read an entire GUID aloud; it's simply too error-prone.

Here's my modified solution:

public interface IRepository<T>
{
    void Create(Guid id, T item);
 
    int GetHumanReadableId(Guid id);
 
    // other members
}

Notice that the Create method is the same as before. The client must still supply a GUID for the Entity, and that GUID may or may not be the 'real' ID of the Entity. However, in addition to the GUID, the system also associates a (human-readable) integer ID with the Entity. Which one is the 'real' ID isn't particularly important; the important part is that there's another method you can use to get the integer ID associated with the GUID: the GetHumanReadableId method.

The Create method is a Command, which is only proper, because creating (or saving) the Entity mutates the state of the system. The GetHumanReadableId method, on the other hand, is a Query: you can call it as many times as you like: it doesn't change the state of the system.

If you want to store your Entities in a database, you can still do that. When you save the Entity, you save it with the GUID, but you can also let the database engine assign an integer ID; it might even be a monotonically increasing ID (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). At the same time, you could have a secondary index on the GUID.

When a client invokes the GetHumanReadableId method, the database can use the secondary index on the GUID to quickly find the Entity and return its integer ID.

Performance #

"But," you're likely to say, "I don't like that! It's bad for performance!"

Perhaps. My first impulse is to quote Donald Knuth at you, but in the end, I may have to yield that my proposed design may result in two out-of-process calls instead of one. Still, I never promised that my solution wouldn't involve a trade-off. Most software design decisions involve trade-offs, and so does this one. You gain better encapsulation for potentially worse performance.

Still, the performance drawback may not involve problems as such. First, while having to make two round trips to the database may perform worse than a single one, it may still be fast enough. Second, even if you need to know the (human-readable) integer ID, you may not need to know it when you create it. Sometimes you can get away with saving the Entity in one action, and then you may only need to know what the ID is seconds or minutes later. In this case, separating reads and writes may actually turn out to be an advantage.

Must all code be designed like this? #

Even if you disregard your concerns about performance, you may find this design overly complex, and more difficult to use. Do I really recommend that all code should be designed like that?

No, I don't recommend that all code should be designed according to the CQS principle. As Martin Fowler points out, in Object-Oriented Software Construction, Bertrand Meyer explains how to design an API for a Stack with CQS. It involves a Pop Command, and a Top Query: in order to use it, you would first have to invoke the Top Query to get the item on the top of the stack, and then subsequently invoke the Pop Command to modify the state of the stack.

One of the problems with such a design is that it isn't thread-safe. It's also more unwieldy to use than e.g. the standard Stack<T>.Pop method.

My point with all of this isn't to dictate to you that you should always follow CQS. The point is that you can always come up with a design that does.

In my career, I've met many programmers who write a poorly designed class or interface, and then put a little apology on top of it:

public interface IRepository<T>
{
    // CQS is impossible here, because we need the ID
    int Create(T item);
 
    // other members
}

Many times, we don't know of a better way to do things, but it doesn't mean that such a way doesn't exist; we just haven't learned about it yet. In this article, I've shown you how to solve a seemingly impossible design challenge with CQS.

Knowing that even a design problem such as this can be solved with CQS should put you in a better position to make an informed decision. You may still decide to violate CQS and define a Create method that returns an integer, but if you've done that, it's because you've weighed the alternatives; not because you thought it impossible.

Summary #

It's possible to apply CQS to most problems. As always, there are trade-offs involved, but knowing how to apply CQS, even if, at first glance, it seems impossible, is an important design skill.

Personally, I tend to adhere closely to CQS when I do Object-Oriented Design, but I also, occasionally, decide to break that principle. When I do, I do so realising that I'm making a trade-off, and I don't do it lightly.

Comments

POST /api/users

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Location: /api/status/1234

POST /api/users

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: /api/users/8765

{ "name" : "Mark Seemann" }

public interface IRepository<T>
{
    T CreateEntity();

    void AttachEntity(T entity);
}

public abstract class Entity<T>
{
    private readonly T _id;
    
    protected Entity(T id)
    {
        _id = id;
    }

    public T ID { get { return _id; } }

    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        return _id.GetHashCode();
    }

    public override bool Equals(object other)
    {
        var otherEntity = other as Entity;
        if (otherEntity == null)
            return false;

        return _id == otherEntity._id;
    }
}

public class Foo
{
    private readonly Guid id;
 
    public Foo(Guid id)
    {
        if (id == Guid.Empty)
            throw new ArgumentException("Empty GUIDs not allowed.", "id");
        this.id = id;
    }
 
    public Guid Id
    {
        get { return this.id; }
    }
 
    // other members go here...
}

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Reservations] (
    [Id]           INT              NOT NULL IDENTITY,
    [At]           DATETIME2 (7)    NOT NULL,
    [Name]         NVARCHAR (50)    NOT NULL,
    [Email]        NVARCHAR (50)    NOT NULL,
    [Quantity]     INT              NOT NULL,
    [PublicId]     UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL UNIQUE,
    [RestaurantId] INT              NOT NULL
    PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([Id] ASC)
)

public sealed record IOSuccess(string Value);
public abstract record Failure(string Value);
public sealed record ValidationFailure(string Value) : Failure(Value);
public sealed record IOFailure(string Value) : Failure(Value);

public sealed record GetBalloonQuery(BalloonId Id);
public sealed record UpdateBalloonCommand(Balloon Balloon);
public sealed record PopBalloonCommand(BalloonId Id, IPointyObject Needle);

public interface IBalloonRepository
{
  Task<Either<IReadOnlyCollection<Balloon>, IOFailure>> GetBalloonsAsync();
  Task<Either<Balloon, IOFailure>> GetBalloonAsync(GetBalloonQuery query);
  Task<Either<IOSuccess, IOFailure>> UpdateBalloonAsync(UpdateBalloonCommand command);
  Task<Either<IOSuccess, IOFailure>> DeleteBalloonAsync(PopBalloonCommand command);
}