Andrew Peters’ Blog

One of the issues with current implementations of the Repository pattern is that ORM specific details can leak into the Repository interface. Most commonly this takes the form of concrete ORM querying machinery such as Query Objects, Expressions or custom object query languages. This weakening of the Repository abstraction is undesirable because it can make it more difficult to use our Repositories in different ways. For example using a fake repository to speed up our unit tests.

Enter LINQ. With language-level support for building expressions, we can now shore up our Repository interface in a completely abstract way. Our query expressions are simply handed off to the appropriate LINQ-provider which does the heavy-lifting for us. Even better, normal collections can be queried using LINQ and so implementing trivial in-memory fake repositories is dead easy. We used this approach on BackgroundMotion and it worked pretty well. Here’s what some of the code looks like:

// our Repository contract...
 
public interface IRepository<T>
  where T : IIdentifiable
{
  int Count();
  int Count(Expression<Func<T, bool>> expression);
 
  void Add(T entity);
  void Remove(T entity);
  void Save(T entity);
 
  T FindOne(int id);
  T FindOne(Expression<Func<T, bool>> expression);
 
  bool TryFindOne(Expression<Func<T, bool>> expression, out T entity);
 
  IList<T> FindAll();
  IList<T> FindAll(Expression<Func<T, bool>> expression);
 
  IQueryable<T> Find();
  IQueryable<T> Find(int id);
  IQueryable<T> Find(Expression<Func<T, bool>> expression);
}
 
// and this is how we used our real Repository implementation
 
Repository<Contribution>
  .Find(c => c.ApprovedById == null);
 
// or...
 
Repository<Tag>
  .Find()
  .OrderBy(t => t.Value)
  .Take(Constants.PageSize)
  .ToList();

Using this approach we were able to implement a fake Repository that used simple collections internally and just worked.

Good times. :-)