The Repository Facade

Posted at 07:00 on 09 October 2014

Most developers use the term "Repository" to refer to a wrapper or abstraction layer around your O/R mapper, supposedly to let you switch out one persistence mechanism for another. However, if you look at its definition in its historical context, you'll see that this isn't what it refers to at all.

The Repository pattern is a part of your O/R mapper itself.

The Repository pattern was first described as follows in Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture:

Mediates between the domain and data mapping layers using a collection-like interface for accessing domain objects.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture was written in 2003, at a time when O/R mapping technology was in its infancy. Most ORMs were commercial products, very simple by today's standards -- more akin to the likes of Dapper or PetaPoco than to modern heavyweights like NHibernate or Entity Framework. Hand-rolled data access layers were very much the order of the day. Furthermore, many of the patterns described in P of EAA -- Table Data Gateway, Row Data Gateway, Data Mapper, Unit of Work, Identity Map, Lazy Load, and so on, all catalogue what are now different components of modern-day ORMs.

So when the Repository pattern talks about mediating between the domain and "data mapping layers," it isn't referring to your ORM as a whole, as most developers seem to assume, but to just one component of your ORM -- specifically, the component that copies data from the results of the generated SQL query into your entities. This mediating layer is also an element of functionality provided by modern ORMs.

For example, Entity Framework's DbSet<T> is a Repository. So too is NHibernate's ISession, with methods such as QueryOver<T>().

So what is the wrapper class that people write around their ORMs then, the one that they tend to refer to as a Repository? A more accurate term for this is, in actual fact, a Repository Facade.

It's important to draw the distinction, especially with the debate around whether this pattern has any value or not. Referring to your ORM itself as a Repository makes it easy for people to make the conceptual leap that allows them to just plug Entity Framework straight into their business service classes without the additional layer of abstraction, but on the other hand it can cause a bit of confusion if you then start saying that "the Repository pattern is harmful." That's why I'm now being careful to use the term "Repository" to refer to Entity Framework, NHibernate or the RavenDB client itself, and the term "Repository Facade" to refer to the practice of adding an extra abstraction layer around it.