Saturday, October 31, 2009

A Final Look



[ Team LiB ]





A Final Look


That's it. This integration could have turned our simple, conceptually consistent design into a tangled mess, but now, using an ANTICORRUPTION LAYER, a SERVICE, and some ENTERPRISE SEGMENTS, we have integrated the functionality of the Sales Management System into our booking system cleanly, enriching the domain.


A final design question: Why not give Cargo the responsibility of deriving the Enterprise Segment? At first glance it seems elegant, if all the data the derivation is based on is in the Cargo, to make it a derived attribute of Cargo. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Enterprise Segments are defined arbitrarily to divide along lines useful for business strategy. The same ENTITIES could be segmented differently for different purposes. We are deriving the segment for a particular Cargo for booking allocation purposes, but it could have a completely different Enterprise Segment for tax accounting purposes. Even the allocation Enterprise Segment could change if the Sales Management System is reconfigured because of a new sales strategy. So the Cargo would have to know about the Allocation Checker, which is well outside its conceptual responsibility, and it would be laden with methods for deriving specific types of Enterprise Segment. Therefore, the responsibility for deriving this value lies properly with the object that knows the rules for segmentation, rather than the object that has the data to which those rules apply. Those rules could be split out into a separate "Strategy" object, which could be passed to a Cargo to allow it to derive an Enterprise Segment. That solution seems to go beyond the requirements we have here, but it would be an option for a later design and shouldn't be a very disruptive change.





    [ Team LiB ]



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