Inseparable concerns
Posted at 08:00 on 16 February 2015
Separation of concerns is often cited as the reasoning behind the traditional three-layer architecture. It is important, otherwise you will end up with a Big Ball of Mud.
However, in order to separate out your concerns, you must first categorise them correctly as either business concerns, presentational concerns or data access concerns. Otherwise you will end up with unnecessary complexity, poor performance, anaemic layers, and/or poor testability.
Unfortunately, most three-layer applications completely fail to categorise their concerns correctly. More often than not this is because it is simply not possible to do so, as some concerns fall into more than one category and can’t be refactored out without introducing adverse effects. I propose the term inseparable concerns for such cases.
The key to separation of concerns is to let it be driven by your tests. Under TDD, the first thing you would do if a particular line of code contained a bug would be to write a failing unit test that would pass given the expected correct behaviour. It is what this test does that tells you whether the code under test is a business concern, a data access concern, or a presentational concern.
It is a presentational concern if the test simulates raw user input, or examines final rendered output. For example, mocking any part of a raw HTTP request (GET or POST arguments, cookies, HTTP headers, and so on), verifying the returned HTTP status code, or examining the output generated by a view. In general, if it’s your controllers or your views that you’re testing, it’s a presentational concern.
It is a business concern if the test verifies the correctness of a business rule. Basically, this means that queries are business concerns, period. If they are not returning the correct results, then they have not implemented some business rule or other correctly. Other examples of business concerns include validation, verifying that the data passed to the database or a web service from a command is correct, or confirming that the correct exception is thrown in response to various failure modes.
It is a data access concern if the test requires the code to hit the database. Note that this is where the so-called “best practice” that your unit tests should never hit the database breaks down: if you are adhering to it strictly, sooner or later you will encounter a bug where it stops you from writing a failing test. Most people, when confronted with such cases, skip this step. Don’t: TDD should take precedence. Set up a test database and write the test already.
It is an inseparable concern if it falls into more than one of the above categories. Pretty much any performance-related optimisation that you do will be an example here. For example, if you have to bypass Entity Framework and drop down to raw SQL, you will have to hit the database to verify that business logic is correct. Therefore, it is both a business concern and a data access concern.
Inseparable concerns are much more prevalent than you might expect. IQueryable<T> is the best that we've got in terms of making your business and data access layers separable, but, as Mark Seemann points out, it still falls short because NotSupportedException. Another example is calling .Include() on a DbSet to include child entities. Although this is a no-op on Mock<IDbSet<T>>, you can't verify that you are making the correct calls to .Include() in the first place without hitting the database. Besides which, if you're mocking DbSet<T> instead of IDbSet<T>, as you’re supposed to be able to do with EF6, calling .Include() throws an exception.
I would just like to stress here that inseparable concerns are not an antipattern—they are a fact of life. All but the simplest of code bases will have them somewhere. The real antipattern is not introducing them, but trying to treat them as if they were something that they’re not.