C# MongoDB: How to correctly map a domain object?

Question

I recently started reading Evans' Domain-Driven design book and started a small sample project to get some experience in DDD. At the same time I wanted to learn more about MongoDB and started to replace my SQL EF4 repositories with MongoDB and the latest official C# driver. Now this question is about MongoDB mapping. I see that it is pretty easy to map simple objects with public getters and setters - no pain there. But I have difficulties mapping domain entities without public setters. As I learnt, the only really clean approach to construct a valid entity is to pass the required parameters into the constructor. Consider the following example:

public class Transport : IEntity<Transport>
{
    private readonly TransportID transportID;
    private readonly PersonCapacity personCapacity;

    public Transport(TransportID transportID,PersonCapacity personCapacity)
    {
        Validate.NotNull(personCapacity, "personCapacity is required");
        Validate.NotNull(transportID, "transportID is required");

        this.transportID = transportID;
        this.personCapacity = personCapacity;
    }

    public virtual PersonCapacity PersonCapacity
    {
        get { return personCapacity; }
    }

    public virtual TransportID TransportID
    {
        get { return transportID; }
    } 
}


public class TransportID:IValueObject<TransportID>
{
    private readonly string number;

    #region Constr

    public TransportID(string number)
    {
        Validate.NotNull(number);

        this.number = number;
    }

    #endregion

    public string IdString
    {
        get { return number; }
    }
}

 public class PersonCapacity:IValueObject<PersonCapacity>
{
    private readonly int numberOfSeats;

    #region Constr

    public PersonCapacity(int numberOfSeats)
    {
        Validate.NotNull(numberOfSeats);

        this.numberOfSeats = numberOfSeats;
    }

    #endregion

    public int NumberOfSeats
    {
        get { return numberOfSeats; }
    }
}

Obviously automapping does not work here. Now I can map those three classes by hand via BsonClassMaps and they will be stored just fine. The problem is, when I want to load them from the DB I have to load them as BsonDocuments, and parse them into my domain object. I tried lots of things but ultimately failed to get a clean solution. Do I really have to produce DTOs with public getters/setters for MongoDB and map those over to my domain objects? Maybe someone can give me some advice on this.

Answer 1

It is possible to serialize/deserialize classes where the properties are read-only. If you are trying to keep your domain objects persistance ignorant, you won't want to use BsonAttributes to guide the serialization, and as you pointed out AutoMapping requires read/write properties, so you would have to register the class maps yourself. For example, the class:

public class C {
    private ObjectId id;
    private int x;

    public C(ObjectId id, int x) {
        this.id = id;
        this.x = x;
    }

    public ObjectId Id { get { return id; } }
    public int X { get { return x; } }
}

Can be mapped using the following initialization code:

BsonClassMap.RegisterClassMap<C>(cm => {
    cm.MapIdField("id");
    cm.MapField("x");
});

Note that the private fields cannot be readonly. Note also that deserialization bypasses your constructor and directly initializes the private fields (.NET serialization works this way also).

Here's a full sample program that tests this:

http://www.pastie.org/1822994