Does it make sense to group all Interfaces of your Domain Layer (Modules, Models, Entities, Domain Services, etc) all within the Infrastructure layer? If not, does it make sense to create a ‘shared’ project/component that groups all of these into a shared library? After all, the definition of ‘Infrastructure Layer’ includes ‘shared libraries for Domain, Application, and UI layers’.
I am thinking of designing my codebase around the DDD layers: UI, Application, Domain, Infrastructure. This would create 4 projects respectfully. My point is, you reference the Infrastructure Layer from the Domain Layer. But if you define the interfaces in the Domain Layer project, say for IPost, then you’ll have a circulur reference when you have to reference the Domain Layer project from the Infrastructure project when you are defining the IPostRepository.Save(IPost post) method. Hence, the idea of ‘define all Interfaces in the Shared library’.
Perhaps the repositories should not expect an object to save (IPostRepository.Save(IPost post); but instead, expect the params of the object (that could be a long set of params in the Save() though). Given, this could be an ideal situation that shows when an object is getting overly complex, and additional Value Objects should be looked into for it.
Thoughts?
Concerning where to put the repositories, personally I always put the repositories in a dedicated infrastructure layer (e.g . MyApp.Data.Oracle) but declare the interfaces to which the repositories have to conform to in the domain layer.
In my projects the Application Layer has to access the Domain and Infrastructure layer because it’s responsible to configure the domain and infrastructure layer.
The application layer is responsible to inject the proper infrastructure into the domain. The domain doesn’t know to which infrastructure it’s talking to, it only knows how to call it. Of course I use IOC containers like Structuremap to inject the dependencies into the domain. Again I do not state that this is the way DDD recommends to structure your projects, it’s just the way, I architecture my apps. Cheers.