Question

I am working with a financial application and am looking for the best solution for designing my application.

We have 100’s of stored procedures where most/all of our business logic sits. We have WCF web services projects built using Web Service Software Factory (http://servicefactory.codeplex.com/). We have stored procedures built for nearly everything (tables, dropdowns, etc..) and each of these stored procs have their own webservice exposed to be called by the web application. Each web service is a very simple method that calls the stored procedure with the exact paramaters of the web service.

I am not too sure if this is the best design and would like to ask for suggestions and alternatives to the design.

Does anyone else have a similar environment ? How is it implemented on your end ?

Answer 1

It’s a classic trade-off between:

• having small, focused services that do one thing and one thing only – you end up with lots of ’em
• having larger services with lots of methods that do lots of things – but you have fewer of them

In general, I would say I would prefer approach #1 – keep your services nice and small and easy to maintain, and respect the single responsibility principle – a service (or class) should do one thing and one thing only.

You might be able to combine a few calls that logically belong together into a single service with a few calls – but as soon as the service has too many calls (more than 10? 15? 20?) it has a tendency to get unwieldy and you end up having to change it too frequently because it handles so many tasks….