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Understanding Onion Architecture: An Example Folder Structure by Alessandro Traversi

By 15/09/2023octobre 31st, 2023No Comments

We will implement the Mediator pattern later in this tutorial. We will start off by creating a Blank Solution on Visual Studio. PS, I use Visual Studio 2019 Comunity which is completely FREE. We will use the business domain of a Ride Sharing/Taxi Booking Application.

onion architecture

This architecture is undoubtedly biased toward object-oriented programming, and it puts objects before all others. At the center of Onion Architecture is the domain model, which represents the business and behavior objects. Around the domain layer are other layers, with more behaviors. Most of the traditional architectures raise fundamental issues of tight coupling and separation of concerns.

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A curated list of awesome articles, videos, and other resources to learn and practice software architecture, patterns, and principles. Each layer can be independently tested, allowing for comprehensive unit tests and ensuring that business logic remains isolated from external dependencies. The clear separation of concerns and decoupling of dependencies enable easier maintenance and modification of code, making it more adaptable to changing requirements.

We have now set our expectations for anyone wishing to charge a user for a transaction within our Application Services layer. However, we are not doing anything useful at the moment with the transaction so from this and following the layers of Onion Architecture we need to define our Domain Services layer. Remember that we have two abstract exception classes BadRequestException and NotFoundException inside of the Domain layer? By now it should be obvious that the Presentation project will only have a reference to the Services.Abstraction project.

Clean Frontend Architecture

The architecture is named Onion Architecture because it has several layers around the core of the application, just like the layers of an onion. The core of the application contains the business logic and is independent of the infrastructure and the user interface. The infrastructure and user interface layers depend on the core layer. It’s a software that any developer should be able to do improvements and fixes without worrying about breaking something under the hood. Any developer, familiar with the domain, should be able to understand the code, and easily know where to change things.Modifying the view layer should not break any domain logic.

DTOs are well suited as objects with really specific formats and data. In essence, MVC resolves the separation of concerns problem, but the tight coupling problem remains. The application is separated into layers, each with its own duties and concerns.

Benefits of Onion Architecture:

First, you need to create the Asp.net Core web API project using visual studio. After creating the project, we will add our layer to the project. After adding all the layers our project structure will look like this. There are some cases where it’s hard to fit a behavior into a single domain model.Imagine that you are modeling a banking system, where you have the Account domain model. I’ll be writing more about the Onion Architecture as a default approach for building enterprise applications. I will stay in the enterprise system space and all discussion will reside in that context.

onion architecture

They are going to be treated the same as if they were defined conventionally. We have already prepared a working project for you and we’re going to be looking at each of the projects in the solution, and talking about how they fit into the Onion architecture. The Domain layer does not have any direct dependencies on the outside layers. The outer layers are all allowed to reference the layers that are directly below them in the hierarchy. The Onion architecture is a form of layered architecture and we can visualize these layers as concentric circles.

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Because ASP.NET Core uses Dependency Injection everywhere, we need to have a reference to all of the projects in the solution from the Web application project. This allows us to configure our services inside of the Startup class. Onion Architecture requires a good understanding of software architecture principles and design patterns. Developers who are not familiar with these concepts may find it challenging to implement and maintain an Onion Architecture-based application. The Model is used to move data between the View and the Controller, where the business logic executes any operations. The Controller handles web requests via action methods and returns the appropriate View.

I hope you’ll find my experience useful for your projects. The practice has shown that 90 percent of requests concern get operations; as a rule, they are small and quick. 10 percent of requests concern put operations; these operations are usually complicated due to a range of transactions and validations.

What is Clean Architecture?

The higher the coupling, the lower the ability to change and evolve the system. This library provides almost limitless opportunities for setting data validation rules. It is well compatible with CQRS due to pipeline behaviors. But it does not quite solve the validation problem, especially if you need to take information from a database or from another microservice.

  • An approach to layering the code of an application according to its functionality and purpose is known as onion architecture.
  • Onion Architecture solved these problem by defining layers from the core to the Infrastructure.
  • This class is coupled to a particular method of data access, and that is why it resides outside the application core.
  • However, this architecture pattern is not a silver bullet to every problem.
  • For example, the UI layer communicates with business logic, which communicates with the data layer.
  • It guarantees that the codebase is scalable, manageable, and understandable.
  • Clean code is simple to read, which facilitates debugging and modification.

Interfaces for these are defined in the Domain Services layer — IFareRepostory and IRouteService. RiderFareCalculator is implemented in this layer also, and it depends on the fare repository and route service interfaces declared in the same layer. Note that with this approach, we do not depend on the external service, rather the external service depends on our declared contracts. An approach to layering the code of an application according to its functionality and purpose is known as onion architecture.

Advantages of Onion Architecture in ASP.NET Core

If you have very complex business logic, it would make sense to encapsulate it inside of our domain entities. But for most applications, it is usually easier to start with a simpler domain model, and only introduce complexity if it is required by the project. We can use lower layers of the Onion architecture to define contracts or interfaces.

Separation of Concerns:

The Domain entities in the center represent the business and behavior objects. These layers can change, but the domain entities layer is always in the middle. The other layer describes an object’s behavior in greater detail. The outer circle’s classes, methods, variables, and source code generally depend on the inner circle but not the other way around. The domain model is at the center of Domain-Driven Design or development, which thoroughly understands a domain’s procedures and regulations. It creates software for complicated requirements by closely connecting the implementation to a changing model of fundamental business ideas.

Business Logic is probably the most important part of this entire setup. It holds all the logic related to the Business requirements. Now, every application ideally has its own dedicated Database. In order to access the onion architecture Database, we introduce a Data Access Layer. This layer usually holds ORMs for ASP.NET to fetch/write to the database. When there is just a logical separation in your application, we can term it as layers or N Layers.