This question might be asked a thousand of times but a lot of confusions and contradictions in the answers.
I ask about the validations in the context of domain driven design.
In which layer should the validations be done mainly ?
Is it acceptable for the object to be in invalid state? because many answers said that it's okay and mainly because of historical data and the business rules may change over time and loading historical data might cause problems?
Many implementations consider throwing exceptions in the domain layer and mapping the messages to the UI although Martin Fowler recommends to Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations! When to return messages and when to throw exceptions in the validation context ?
Many articles explain some tips or paths to follow like Vladimir Khorikov and jbogard in their articles but in the comments they confess that they do things a wee differently now. Are these patterns still valid?
Should I use framework like FluentValidation and if I use it, Is this frame work used only in the application layer as an alternative to the MVC annotations ?
When Should I use Business Rule Framework (BRF) instead?
I know many questions here but they target the same spot(Validation in DDD).
Note: I don't use CQRS pattern because it made the application so complex.
So I have (domain layer,data layer, application layer(MVC), and shared kernel)
In which layer should the validations be done mainly ?
Mainly in Domain, except for infrastructure related validation, e.g. xsd validation or json schema for instance.
Is it acceptable for the object to be in invalid state? because many
answers said that it's okay and mainly because of historical data and
the business rules may change over time and loading historical data
might cause problems?
It can be acceptable, because validation is done into domain it should not be the case. On a point of view of business, objects cannot be in an invalid business state, however, some times, like in the real life, process can be in an invalid/temporary state. We call it eventual consistency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency), I suggest you take a look at this. At the end the system will be in a valid state and that's all that matter, if its temporarily invalid, well, the effort might be bigger to maintain such system but sometimes you have no choice.
Many implementations consider throwing exceptions in the domain layer
and mapping the messages to the UI although Martin Fowler recommends
to Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations!
When to return messages and when to throw exceptions in the validation
context ?
I am not a big fan of exceptions in the domain layer unless this is clearly a pre-requisite thesis broken. For instance an input too large for a field, or a negative price for an item. If you cannot build a valid business object, then in my opinion this is a very valid case for an exception. In case this is a business case, a message is best suited.
Many articles explain some tips or paths to follow like Vladimir
Khorikov and jbogard in their articles but in the comments they
confess that they do things a wee differently now. Are these patterns
still valid?
Should I use framework like FluentValidation and if I use it, Is this
frame work used only in the application layer as an alternative to the
MVC annotations ?
Best recommendations in DDD is to never use framework, Spring or JDBC might help however but in general you should do it by hand. We have written even stores by hand, application services and Oracle projections and event bus. Its more faster, more maintainable, and you learn a lot more. Vaughn Vernon in his book (Implementing Domain Driven Design) gives very good examples and a project you can look at: https://github.com/VaughnVernon/IDDD_Samples (written in Java)
When Should I use Business Rule Framework (BRF) instead?
Again, don't use a framework
There are actually several different activities that might be called "validations", and they are all handled somewhat differently.
Message validation usually happens as close to the boundary as we can manage. When I receive an HTTP request, I'm going to verify that the request itself is well formed, that the right media type is specified in the meta data, that the request body can be processed cleanly, that the resulting DOM has all of the required fields, that the known data nodes are all of the appropriate type, that the values present are within the allowed ranges, all before I worry about the current state of the domain model.
Often, this validation takes the form of transforming the data from the message into a graph of value objects in the domain; that will usually look like factories or builders that know how to take domain agnostic value types and convert them into domain specific values. The domain model won't normally know anything about the message format, and won't know about the serialization (JSON is not normally a domain concern).
There is a similar separation of concerns when reading values from the persistent store - the value factories will know how to create values from primitives, but won't necessarily know anything about JSON, or results sets, and so on.
The "business logic", which validates whether a given message is meaningful given the current state of the domain, usually lives within the domain model.
Is it acceptable for the object to be in invalid state?
It shouldn't ever be acceptable for an object to be in an invalid state.
BUT there are valid states that aren't reachable. Negative account balances are becoming a significant liability for the company, so a new business rule is introduced that prevents withdrawals that would result in a negative balance. That doesn't change the fact that Bob's account balance is negative. It's still a valid state, just one that isn't reachable with the new rules.
When to return messages and when to throw exceptions in the validation context ?
Don't use exceptions to implement contingency management.
There are straight answers for your questions. So I put the answers with no background.
In which layer should the validations be done mainly?
Both server and client side for more accurate and secure applications. Regardless of design context. For server side you may employ different ways like fluent validation or Data Annotation (Model) or bring them to client with integration libraries like jquery-unobtrusive-ajax. Server side validation is more important, since CRUD operations needs to be validated to avoid anomalies and etc ....
In terms of your question, layers are View and Model (Data Access).
Is it acceptable for the object to be in invalid state? because many
answers said that it's okay and mainly because of historical data and
the business rules may change over time and loading historical data
might cause problems?
It's acceptable, required fields or empty values for required dependencies fires error when you show or process data store in Database. Here, there is no speaking about changes which can be over time. We only consider now. We employ patterns and programming rules to create flexibility/maintainability. Validations and entry dependencies can be changed over time.
Many implementations consider throwing exceptions in the domain layer
and mapping the messages to the UI although Martin Fowler recommends
to Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations!
When to return messages and when to throw exceptions in the validation
context ?
Showing exception in client-side is a good technique for development days or notifying corresponding user about the error which prevents data to be changed/stored. considering that: some systems really have no strategy to show additional info to the end user. Some reports can make the app more vulnerable to intrude. This is completely based on the software type you are developing. A good practice is showing a simple error in client-side and store error logs inside server (with comprehensive details).
Many articles explain some tips or paths to follow like Vladimir
Khorikov and jbogard in their articles but in the comments they
confess that they do things a wee differently now. Are these patterns
still valid?
Some people may have personal architectures with their own naming. But some of them are official and widely used like Unit Of Work or Repository Pattern which add some layers to famous pattern (MVC) to achieve more accurate, clean and maintainable code/application. Follow the main purpose behind any pattern.
Should I use framework like FluentValidation and if I use it, Is this
frame work used only in the application layer as an alternative to the
MVC annotations ? When Should I use Business Rule Framework (BRF)
instead?
FluentValidation is an alternative to DataAnnotations working like the FluentAPI. Note that both used to define rules for properties belonging to a defined class (a database table). There's a concept named ViewModel which contains a transformation(with some changes) for Main Model class (Table) mainly targeting the validation in front-end. You may employ both for a project, mapping each Model to its ViewModel or vice versa. If you are using a repository pattern, say, have a Data Access Layer, So some of the validation is inside this layer. If you're using ViewModel, so it's inside application layer. But, As an advice, These are worthless. The key success is to understand main purpose behind any technique/architecture/pattern. You can find tons of article around each of them and focus on purpose, then you can decide what to do to have a more clean/standard/maintainable/flexible/etc... code.
And the Final Tip : Increasing the modularity increases the cost to integration (software cost) Although decreases cost for each module. Use a moderate design for your project. Combining architectures sometimes not only is not a good idea but also increases the cost and development hardships. More details in software design basics
That is a broad question, and I appreciate no short/dumb asnwers like: "Oh that is the model job, this quest is retarded (period)"
PROBLEM Where I work at people created a system over 2 years for managing the manufacture process over demand in the most simplified still broad as possible, involving selling, buying, assemble, The system is coded over Ruby On Rails.
The app has been changed lots of times and the result is a mess on callbacks (some are called several times), 200+ models, and fat controllers: Total bad.
The QUESTION is, if there is a gem, or pattern designed to handle Rails large app logic? The logic whould be able to fully talk to models (whose only concern would be data format handling and validation)
What I EXPECT is to reduce complexity from various controllers, and hard to track callbacks into files with the responsibility to handle a business operation logic. In some cases there is the need to wait for a response, in others, only validation of the input is enough and a bg process would take place.
ie:
--> Sell some products (need to wait the operation to finish)
1. Set a View able to get the products input
2. Controller gets the product list inputed by employee and call the logic
Logic::ExecuteWithResponse('sell', 'products', :prods => #product_list_with_qtt, :when => #date, :employee => current_user() )
This Logic would handle buying order, assemble order, machine schedule, warehouse reservation, and others.
Have in mind that a callback on SalesOrder is not enough, since it depends on where it is called (no field for that), depends on the class of the user, among other stuff not visible for the model, or in some cases it would take long for the model to process.
The inherent complexity of the business object and logic will need to be tackled with, understood, and internalized (or at least documented well) for the team. That will not go away. The recommendation I have is to grab all the logic peppered throughout the "fat" controllers and move them into either the domain objects, application services (service layer), or simply transaction scripts (see Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture").
Ideally all the business logic embedded in the labyrinth of callbacks can be refactored into components described above to promote understanding. This gets rid of all the incidental complexity built up over time on the controllers. But even after getting rid of all that, I suspect a certain level of inherent complexity will remain in the problem domain.
The idea of Service Layer is to incorporate high level logic which is not associated with certain model in a good way. If you develop enterprise like system with multiple services integrated and have number of data sources you should better look to Domain-Driven Design (DDD) by Eric Evans. Surely, Fowler's Enterprise patterns book is good in this case too.
Also look at DataMapper(2, the first one was similar to ActiveRecord). It has better design approach for such type of systems and have less limitation (on conceptual level) than ActiveRecord in Rails.
Truly say, that's because of dynamic nature of Ruby people so long tackling conceptual problems of ActiveRecord and try to fit it enterprise needs, IMHO.
Some people have done some work out there on service layers and callbacks Pat Maddox (especially callbacks) is one, Jay Fields (his very early works around the rails presenter pattern later to be replaced with a service layer like pattern) is another. I must admit I like the idea of adding a extra layer. To me, business logic just doesn't belong in models and models should be decoupled in complex projects. I also like the idea of an extra layer over callbacks, for me callbacks become too complex as there numbers increase
This is far from full blown DDD and at the moment I don't know how DDD would work in Rails, however ,I am sure it could and I am sure someone is working on it out there right now. For my projects, at the moment, it would be a bit of a overkill to implement, however, I would consider adding a service layer.
I'm working on a project with developers who have not worked with Ruby OR Rails before.
They have created a schema that is too complicated, in my opinion. The schema has 117 tables, and obtaining the simplest piece of information would require traversing/joining 7 tabels...and of course, there's no "main" table that serves as a sort of key between them. The schema renders many of the rails tools like 'find' method, and many of the has_many/belongs to relationships almost useless. And coding for all of these relationships will likely be more time-consuming than we have the money to code for.
THE QUESTION:
Assuming you are VERY convinced (IMHO...hehe) that the schema is not ideal, and there are multiple ways to represent the domain, how would you argue FOR simplifying the schema (aside from what I've already said)?
I'll stand up in 2 roles here
DBA: Database admin/designer.
Dev: Application developer.
I assume the DBA is a person who really know all the Database tricks. Reaallyy Knows.
DBA:
Database is the key of the application and should have predefined structure in order to serve its purpose well and with best performance.
If you cannot use random schema (which is reasonably normalised and good) then the tools are wrong.
Dev:
The database is just a data store, so we need to keep it simple and concentrate on the application.
DBA:
Database is not a store it is the core of the application. There is no application without database.
Dev:
No. The application is the core. There is no application without the front-end and the business logic applied to it.
And the war begins...
Both points are valid and it is always trade off.
If the database will ONLY be used by RoR, then you can use it more like a simple store.
If the DB can be used by other application OR it will be used with large amount of data and high traffic it must enforce some best practices.
Generally there is no way you can disagree with DBA.
But they can understand your situation and might allow you to loose the standards a bit so you could be more productive.
So you need to work closely, together.
And you need to talk to each other to explain and prove the point why database should be like this or that.
Otherwise, the team is broken and project can be failure with hight probability.
ActiveRecord is a very handy tool. But it cannot do everything for you. It does not provide Database structure by default that you expect exactly. So it should be tuned.
On the other side. If DBA can accept that all PKs are Auto incremented integers that would make Developer's life easier (ActiveRecord does it by default).
On the other side, if developers would accept some of DBA constraints it would make DBA's life easier.
Now to answer your question:
how would you argue FOR simplifying the schema
Do not argue. Meet the team and deliver the message and point on WHY it should be done.
Maybe it really shouldn't and you don't know all the things, maybe they are not aware of something.
You could agree on the general structure of the database AND try to describe it using RoR migrations as a meta language.
This way they would see the general picture, and you would use your great ActiveRecords.
And also everybody would be on the same page.
Your DB schema should reflect the domain and its relationships.
De-normalisation should only be done when you have measured that there is a performance problem.
7 joins is not excessive or bad, provided you have good indexes in place.
The general way to make this argument up the chain is based on cost. If you do things simply, there will be less code and fewer bugs. The system will be able to be built more quickly, or with more features, and thus will create more ROI. If you can get the money manager on board with that approach, he or she may let you dictate terms to the team. There is the counterargument that extreme over-normalization prevents bad data, but I have found that this is not the case, as the complexity it engenders tends to lead to more errors and more database code in general.
The architectural and technical argument here is simple. You have decided to use Ruby on Rails. Therefore you have decided to use the ActiveRecord pattern. The ActiveRecord pattern is driven by having the database tables match the object model. That's the pattern in use here, and in many other places, so the best practices they are trying to apply for extreme data normalization simply do not apply. Buy a copy of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and put the little red bookmark at page 160 so they can understand how the pattern works from the architecture perspective.
What the DBA types tend to be unaware of is how much work ActiveRecord does for you, from query generation, cascading deletes, optimistic locking, auto populated columns, versioning (with acts_as_versioned), soft deletes (with acts_as_paranoid), etc. There is a strong argument to use well tested, community supported library functions to perform these operations versus custom code that must be maintained by a DBA.
The real issue with DBAs is then that they need some work to do. Let them focus on monitoring performance, finding slow queries in the code, creating indexes and doing backups.
If you end up losing the political battle for a sane schema, you may want to consider switching to DataMapper. It's the next pattern in PoEAA. The other thing you may be able to get them to do is to create views in the database that correspond to the object model. This way, you could use many of the finding capabilities in the ActiveRecord model based on the views, but have custom insert, update, and delete methods.
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As I learn more and more about OOP, and start to implement various design patterns, I keep coming back to cases where people are hating on Active Record.
Often, people say that it doesn't scale well (citing Twitter as their prime example) -- but nobody actually explains why it doesn't scale well; and / or how to achieve the pros of AR without the cons (via a similar but different pattern?)
Hopefully this won't turn into a holy war about design patterns -- all I want to know is ****specifically**** what's wrong with Active Record.
If it doesn't scale well, why not?
What other problems does it have?
There's ActiveRecord the Design Pattern and ActiveRecord the Rails ORM Library, and there's also a ton of knock-offs for .NET, and other languages.
These are all different things. They mostly follow that design pattern, but extend and modify it in many different ways, so before anyone says "ActiveRecord Sucks" it needs to be qualified by saying "which ActiveRecord, there's heaps?"
I'm only familiar with Rails' ActiveRecord, I'll try address all the complaints which have been raised in context of using it.
#BlaM
The problem that I see with Active Records is, that it's always just about one table
Code:
class Person
belongs_to :company
end
people = Person.find(:all, :include => :company )
This generates SQL with LEFT JOIN companies on companies.id = person.company_id, and automatically generates associated Company objects so you can do people.first.company and it doesn't need to hit the database because the data is already present.
#pix0r
The inherent problem with Active Record is that database queries are automatically generated and executed to populate objects and modify database records
Code:
person = Person.find_by_sql("giant complicated sql query")
This is discouraged as it's ugly, but for the cases where you just plain and simply need to write raw SQL, it's easily done.
#Tim Sullivan
...and you select several instances of the model, you're basically doing a "select * from ..."
Code:
people = Person.find(:all, :select=>'name, id')
This will only select the name and ID columns from the database, all the other 'attributes' in the mapped objects will just be nil, unless you manually reload that object, and so on.
I have always found that ActiveRecord is good for quick CRUD-based applications where the Model is relatively flat (as in, not a lot of class hierarchies). However, for applications with complex OO hierarchies, a DataMapper is probably a better solution. While ActiveRecord assumes a 1:1 ratio between your tables and your data objects, that kind of relationship gets unwieldy with more complex domains. In his book on patterns, Martin Fowler points out that ActiveRecord tends to break down under conditions where your Model is fairly complex, and suggests a DataMapper as the alternative.
I have found this to be true in practice. In cases, where you have a lot inheritance in your domain, it is harder to map inheritance to your RDBMS than it is to map associations or composition.
The way I do it is to have "domain" objects that are accessed by your controllers via these DataMapper (or "service layer") classes. These do not directly mirror the database, but act as your OO representation for some real-world object. Say you have a User class in your domain, and need to have references to, or collections of other objects, already loaded when you retrieve that User object. The data may be coming from many different tables, and an ActiveRecord pattern can make it really hard.
Instead of loading the User object directly and accessing data using an ActiveRecord style API, your controller code retrieves a User object by calling the API of the UserMapper.getUser() method, for instance. It is that mapper that is responsible for loading any associated objects from their respective tables and returning the completed User "domain" object to the caller.
Essentially, you are just adding another layer of abstraction to make the code more managable. Whether your DataMapper classes contain raw custom SQL, or calls to a data abstraction layer API, or even access an ActiveRecord pattern themselves, doesn't really matter to the controller code that is receiving a nice, populated User object.
Anyway, that's how I do it.
I think there is a likely a very different set of reasons between why people are "hating" on ActiveRecord and what is "wrong" with it.
On the hating issue, there is a lot of venom towards anything Rails related. As far as what is wrong with it, it is likely that it is like all technology and there are situations where it is a good choice and situations where there are better choices. The situation where you don't get to take advantage of most of the features of Rails ActiveRecord, in my experience, is where the database is badly structured. If you are accessing data without primary keys, with things that violate first normal form, where there are lots of stored procedures required to access the data, you are better off using something that is more of just a SQL wrapper. If your database is relatively well structured, ActiveRecord lets you take advantage of that.
To add to the theme of replying to commenters who say things are hard in ActiveRecord with a code snippet rejoinder
#Sam McAfee Say you have a User class in your domain, and need to have references to, or collections of other objects, already loaded when you retrieve that User object. The data may be coming from many different tables, and an ActiveRecord pattern can make it really hard.
user = User.find(id, :include => ["posts", "comments"])
first_post = user.posts.first
first_comment = user.comments.first
By using the include option, ActiveRecord lets you override the default lazy-loading behavior.
My long and late answer, not even complete, but a good explanation WHY I hate this pattern, opinions and even some emotions:
1) short version: Active Record creates a "thin layer" of "strong binding" between the database and the application code. Which solves no logical, no whatever-problems, no problems at all. IMHO it does not provide ANY VALUE, except some syntactic sugar for the programmer (which may then use an "object syntax" to access some data, that exists in a relational database). The effort to create some comfort for the programmers should (IMHO...) better be invested in low level database access tools, e.g. some variations of simple, easy, plain hash_map get_record( string id_value, string table_name, string id_column_name="id" ) and similar methods (of course, the concepts and elegance greatly varies with the language used).
2) long version: In any database-driven projects where I had the "conceptual control" of things, I avoided AR, and it was good. I usually build a layered architecture (you sooner or later do divide your software in layers, at least in medium- to large-sized projects):
A1) the database itself, tables, relations, even some logic if the DBMS allows it (MySQL is also grown-up now)
A2) very often, there is more than a data store: file system (blobs in database are not always a good decision...), legacy systems (imagine yourself "how" they will be accessed, many varieties possible.. but thats not the point...)
B) database access layer (at this level, tool methods, helpers to easily access the data in the database are very welcome, but AR does not provide any value here, except some syntactic sugar)
C) application objects layer: "application objects" sometimes are simple rows of a table in the database, but most times they are compound objects anyway, and have some higher logic attached, so investing time in AR objects at this level is just plainly useless, a waste of precious coders time, because the "real value", the "higher logic" of those objects needs to be implemented on top of the AR objects, anyway - with and without AR! And, for example, why would you want to have an abstraction of "Log entry objects"? App logic code writes them, but should that have the ability to update or delete them? sounds silly, and App::Log("I am a log message") is some magnitudes easier to use than le=new LogEntry(); le.time=now(); le.text="I am a log message"; le.Insert();. And for example: using a "Log entry object" in the log view in your application will work for 100, 1000 or even 10000 log lines, but sooner or later you will have to optimize - and I bet in most cases, you will just use that small beautiful SQL SELECT statement in your app logic (which totally breaks the AR idea..), instead of wrapping that small statement in rigid fixed AR idea frames with lots of code wrapping and hiding it. The time you wasted with writing and/or building AR code could have been invested in a much more clever interface for reading lists of log-entries (many, many ways, the sky is the limit). Coders should dare to invent new abstractions to realize their application logic that fit the intended application, and not stupidly re-implement silly patterns, that sound good on first sight!
D) the application logic - implements the logic of interacting objects and creating, deleting and listing(!) of application logic objects (NO, those tasks should rarely be anchored in the application logic objects itself: does the sheet of paper on your desk tell you the names and locations of all other sheets in your office? forget "static" methods for listing objects, thats silly, a bad compromise created to make the human way of thinking fit into [some-not-all-AR-framework-like-]AR thinking)
E) the user interface - well, what I will write in the following lines is very, very, very subjective, but in my experience, projects that built on AR often neglected the UI part of an application - time was wasted on creation obscure abstractions. In the end such applications wasted a lot of coders time and feel like applications from coders for coders, tech-inclined inside and outside. The coders feel good (hard work finally done, everything finished and correct, according to the concept on paper...), and the customers "just have to learn that it needs to be like that", because thats "professional".. ok, sorry, I digress ;-)
Well, admittedly, this all is subjective, but its my experience (Ruby on Rails excluded, it may be different, and I have zero practical experience with that approach).
In paid projects, I often heard the demand to start with creating some "active record" objects as a building block for the higher level application logic. In my experience, this conspicuously often was some kind of excuse for that the customer (a software dev company in most cases) did not have a good concept, a big view, an overview of what the product should finally be. Those customers think in rigid frames ("in the project ten years ago it worked well.."), they may flesh out entities, they may define entities relations, they may break down data relations and define basic application logic, but then they stop and hand it over to you, and think thats all you need... they often lack a complete concept of application logic, user interface, usability and so on and so on... they lack the big view and they lack love for the details, and they want you to follow that AR way of things, because.. well, why, it worked in that project years ago, it keeps people busy and silent? I don't know. But the "details" separate the men from the boys, or .. how was the original advertisement slogan ? ;-)
After many years (ten years of active development experience), whenever a customer mentions an "active record pattern", my alarm bell rings. I learned to try to get them back to that essential conceptional phase, let them think twice, try them to show their conceptional weaknesses or just avoid them at all if they are undiscerning (in the end, you know, a customer that does not yet know what it wants, maybe even thinks it knows but doesn't, or tries to externalize concept work to ME for free, costs me many precious hours, days, weeks and months of my time, live is too short ... ).
So, finally: THIS ALL is why I hate that silly "active record pattern", and I do and will avoid it whenever possible.
EDIT: I would even call this a No-Pattern. It does not solve any problem (patterns are not meant to create syntactic sugar). It creates many problems: the root of all its problems (mentioned in many answers here..) is, that it just hides the good old well-developed and powerful SQL behind an interface that is by the patterns definition extremely limited.
This pattern replaces flexibility with syntactic sugar!
Think about it, which problem does AR solve for you?
Some messages are getting me confused.
Some answers are going to "ORM" vs "SQL" or something like that.
The fact is that AR is just a simplification programming pattern where you take advantage of your domain objects to write there database access code.
These objects usually have business attributes (properties of the bean) and some behaviour (methods that usually work on these properties).
The AR just says "add some methods to these domain objects" to database related tasks.
And I have to say, from my opinion and experience, that I do not like the pattern.
At first sight it can sound pretty good. Some modern Java tools like Spring Roo uses this pattern.
For me, the real problem is just with OOP concern. AR pattern forces you in some way to add a dependency from your object to infraestructure objects. These infraestructure objects let the domain object to query the database through the methods suggested by AR.
I have always said that two layers are key to the success of a project. The service layer (where the bussiness logic resides or can be exported through some kind of remoting technology, as Web Services, for example) and the domain layer. In my opinion, if we add some dependencies (not really needed) to the domain layer objects for resolving the AR pattern, our domain objects will be harder to share with other layers or (rare) external applications.
Spring Roo implementation of AR is interesting, because it does not rely on the object itself, but in some AspectJ files. But if later you do not want to work with Roo and have to refactor the project, the AR methods will be implemented directly in your domain objects.
Another point of view. Imagine we do not use a Relational Database to store our objects. Imagine the application stores our domain objects in a NoSQL Database or just in XML files, for example. Would we implement the methods that do these tasks in our domain objects? I do not think so (for example, in the case of XM, we would add XML related dependencies to our domain objects...Truly sad I think). Why then do we have to implement the relational DB methods in the domain objects, as the Ar pattern says?
To sum up, the AR pattern can sound simpler and good for small and simple applications. But, when we have complex and large apps, I think the classical layered architecture is a better approach.
The question is about the Active
Record design pattern. Not an orm
Tool.
The original question is tagged with rails and refers to Twitter which is built in Ruby on Rails. The ActiveRecord framework within Rails is an implementation of Fowler's Active Record design pattern.
The main thing that I've seen with regards to complaints about Active Record is that when you create a model around a table, and you select several instances of the model, you're basically doing a "select * from ...". This is fine for editing a record or displaying a record, but if you want to, say, display a list of the cities for all the contacts in your database, you could do "select City from ..." and only get the cities. Doing this with Active Record would require that you're selecting all the columns, but only using City.
Of course, varying implementations will handle this differently. Nevertheless, it's one issue.
Now, you can get around this by creating a new model for the specific thing you're trying to do, but some people would argue that it's more effort than the benefit.
Me, I dig Active Record. :-)
HTH
Although all the other comments regarding SQL optimization are certainly valid, my main complaint with the active record pattern is that it usually leads to impedance mismatch. I like keeping my domain clean and properly encapsulated, which the active record pattern usually destroys all hope of doing.
I love the way SubSonic does the one column only thing.
Either
DataBaseTable.GetList(DataBaseTable.Columns.ColumnYouWant)
, or:
Query q = DataBaseTable.CreateQuery()
.WHERE(DataBaseTable.Columns.ColumnToFilterOn,value);
q.SelectList = DataBaseTable.Columns.ColumnYouWant;
q.Load();
But Linq is still king when it comes to lazy loading.
#BlaM:
Sometimes I justed implemented an active record for a result of a join. Doesn't always have to be the relation Table <--> Active Record. Why not "Result of a Join statement" <--> Active Record ?
I'm going to talk about Active Record as a design pattern, I haven't seen ROR.
Some developers hate Active Record, because they read smart books about writing clean and neat code, and these books states that active record violates single resposobility principle, violates DDD rule that domain object should be persistant ignorant, and many other rules from these kind of books.
The second thing domain objects in Active Record tend to be 1-to-1 with database, that may be considered a limitation in some kind of systems (n-tier mostly).
Thats just abstract things, i haven't seen ruby on rails actual implementation of this pattern.
The problem that I see with Active Records is, that it's always just about one table. That's okay, as long as you really work with just that one table, but when you work with data in most cases you'll have some kind of join somewhere.
Yes, join usually is worse than no join at all when it comes to performance, but join usually is better than "fake" join by first reading the whole table A and then using the gained information to read and filter table B.
The problem with ActiveRecord is that the queries it automatically generates for you can cause performance problems.
You end up doing some unintuitive tricks to optimize the queries that leave you wondering if it would have been more time effective to write the query by hand in the first place.
Try doing a many to many polymorphic relationship. Not so easy. Especially when you aren't using STI.