How to deal with circular references?

.net visual-studio architecture circular-reference
Eduardo picture Eduardo · Sep 15, 2010 · Viewed 17.4k times · Source

If I have those two projects:

MyCompany.ERP.Billing
MyCompany.ERP.Financial

Billing asks/sends information to Financial and vice-versa. Both are too big so I don't want to put them in a single project. Visual Studio doesn't allow circular references. How would you deal with that?

Answer

devnull picture devnull · Sep 15, 2010

Extract interfaces from your classes and put them into a core project referenced from both Billing and Financial projects. You can then use those interfaces to share data between assemblies.

This only allows you to pass objects between those 2 assemblies, but you can't create objects from the other since you don't actually have a reference to begin with. If you want to be able to create objects you need a factory, external to those 2 projects, that handles object creation.

I would extract the business logic that needs to share the data back and forth between Billing and Financial into another project. This would make things a lot easier and would save you from resorting to all sort of tricks that make maintainability a nightmare.

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