Question

I have an architectural question, we need to develop information system with two frontends: lightweight web-app (ASP.NET) and desktop (WIN-FORMS) app. Nothing special so far, but these two frontends should be able to communicate with two shared and switchable (after app restart) database backends, one SQL database (SQL server) and one, most probably, some kind of XML store (everything in one file would suffice). These two stores won’t be synchronized.
Both applications will be very simple, only few forms.

Please, is there any out-of-the-box stuff, e.g. in Entity framework, which can be tuned as described above?

Or what architectural design would you recommend?

Answer 1

Hmm.

Your best bet is to have a class library project for your data repository.

Give it a known interface and use a factory pattern to decide at runtime whether it generates a SQL instance or a XML instance.

Best have the repository based on a singleton pattern.

Thus you’d have something like Repository base inheriting IRepository, with XMLRespository and SQLRepository inheriting from Repository.

Your business logic then just refers to IRepsository or Repository and doesn’t care about what is actually there (XMLRepository or SQLRepository).

This is similar to the Repository pattern.

If you want to use the same business logic with different front ends and your sticking to ASP.NET Webforms and Winforms then I’d do the same with the business logic i.e. place it into a class library and call from ASP or Winform code as necessary.