Does it make sense to make subsets of an Entity if you consider their usage in the application differently? IE. I take my entity and define a new entity with only some of the attributes of the first. Now I have 2 Entities that overlap but are used differently but ultimately persist in same datatable. These Entities will be accessed through different repositories…
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I am only starting to learn about DDD myself, so if I am wrong please comment and let me know. Here are my thoughts though:
If the entity is going to be accessed through a different repository, I think it deserves its own class. Additionally, the bits that overlap now may not overlap in the future, and if you use a shared base class, you will probably be more likely to try adapting things at that point, which will dirty up your domain.
If the two classes are part of separate sub-domains, they probably should be separate. My thoughts are based around parts of an example I remember hearing in Rob Connery’s interview on Hanselminutes. A product has several properties that are important to consumers (pricing, description, etc), and several properties that are important to warehouse personnel (location in the warehouse, weight, dimensions, etc). The implication to me in that episode was that the two products should be defined separately in the domain, instead of being defined once and shared.