C#•7mo ago

❔ Business Logic Validation in Service Layer

Hey all, I’m working on validating my domain objects that are passed from my framework and drivers (controllers, gRPC service, ect) in my service layer. I’m not sure what the best approach is to apply business logic on my domain entity and have chose to pickup fluentvalidation. This feels a bit overkill, but I’m not sure on what other approaches people use currently. I do not want to throw an exception for business logic validation since it is quite expensive and I would rather return a detailed message that valid failed with a list of errors for all of the validations that failed. Does anyone have any recommendations on patterns for performing validation in the service layer so I can return detailed error responses back to the controller without throwing an exception? I heard about return errors apart of a task, but I have not seen any examples of how this is accomplished.

25 Replies

Bluestopher•7mo ago

This approach looks good for what I am trying to accomplish https://youtu.be/a1ye9eGTB98?si=G63iYJvPRzOqt1t_. I’m just not sure if this is considered normal.

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JakenVeina•7mo ago

public interface IOperationError
{
    string Code { get; }
    string Message { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult<T>
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public T Value { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public interface IOperationError
{
    string Code { get; }
    string Message { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult<T>
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public T Value { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

this is my go-to, roughly

Bluestopher•7mo ago

@V.EINA Jaken Nice, this is solid. But, what if you have an operation error like a validation error. The validation error could possibly contain many error messages.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

then write an error class to represent that that's why .Error on both of those is just IOperationError you can put whatever the hell object you want in there, as long as it implements that interface it's tedious getting errors to bubble up the way an exception would, but you can get around that a little bit with action filters like, for validation

Bluestopher•7mo ago

I see what you are saying.

public interface IOperationError
{
    string Code { get; }
    List<string> ErrorMessages { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult<T>
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public T Value { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public interface IOperationError
{
    string Code { get; }
    List<string> ErrorMessages { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

public struct OperationResult<T>
{
    public bool IsSuccess { get; }
    public T Value { get; }
    public IOperationError Error { get; }
}

JakenVeina•7mo ago

and you're one JsonConvert.Serialize() call away from having detailed error info you can return from an API yeah, no, just Message at least for me

Bluestopher•7mo ago

I like this pattern. Are you saying

List<string> Message { get; }

List<string> Message { get; }

JakenVeina•7mo ago

and arguably, you shouldn't even do that I'm saying more like....

Bluestopher•7mo ago

What would you suggest for that scenario?

JakenVeina•7mo ago

public class CompositeError
    : IOperationError
{
    public string Code
        => GetType().Name;

    public IReadOnlyList<IOperationError> Errors { get; }
}

public class CompositeError
    : IOperationError
{
    public string Code
        => GetType().Name;

    public IReadOnlyList<IOperationError> Errors { get; }
}

if you want all the errors displayed at once, it's up to your UI to interpret the error and do that, when appropriate

Bluestopher•7mo ago

That makes since. This is the type of error my consumers like my controller can go through as well to check the code.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

up to you whether you think a plain Message property is appropriate maybe it is, for PROD environments like, only include the FULL detail in DVLP

Bluestopher•7mo ago

This works well because it can be used by the UI and service. For example, my requests flow goes controller -> service (business logic) -> DAL. The business logic layer would be returning this error. My controller could see the error code and know to just return the error mesages and map it to a specific http error code.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

exactly

Bluestopher•7mo ago

I'm excited to get this implemented tonight since I get to work on a new service where we dont have a pattern for this yet.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

I would recommend looking for existing implementations like this on GitHub first I don't know of any off-hand, but I'm sure they're out there

Bluestopher•7mo ago

You have any recommendations? Or the name of this pattern I could use to lookup repos?

JakenVeina•7mo ago

look for something like "on rails" that's kinda the pattern here actually, I do know of one

JakenVeina•7mo ago

https://github.com/Remora/Remora.Results

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GitHub - Remora/Remora.Results: A simple, versatile algebraic data ...

A simple, versatile algebraic data type for C#. Contribute to Remora/Remora.Results development by creating an account on GitHub.

Bluestopher•7mo ago

Sweet thanks, I'm going to dive into it more.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

you're still free to implement yourself, but there's value to be had in looking to others for inspiration

Bluestopher•7mo ago

Yeah, I agree. I don't know if I need to go as far as some of this, but the way errors are created is a nice pattern than can be added to overtime.

JakenVeina•7mo ago

keep in mind, this does not mean (IMO) that you should not use exceptions this should be your pattern for expected errors or normal operation errors

Bluestopher•7mo ago

Yeah, these are for known things like validation. If there are execptions those will be caught in a try catch. That is, a database throws an unexpected exception. We let it propogate up and log.

Accord•7mo ago

Was this issue resolved? If so, run /close - otherwise I will mark this as stale and this post will be archived until there is new activity.

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❔ Business Logic Validation in Service Layer