This post is a summary of a stream I did last night where I implemented all of this. If you want to watch me grumble my way through it, it’s available on YouTube here.

In my Crispin project, I wanted the ability to support loading Toggles by both name and ID, for all operations. As I use mediator to send messages from my controllers to the handlers in the domain, this means that I had to either:

  • create separate request types for loading by name and loading by id
  • have both an ID and Name property on each method

I didn’t like the sound of either of these as both involve more typing than I want to do, and the second variant has the added downside of causing a lot of if statements in the handlers, as you have to work out which is set before loading. Not to mention the duplication of the load toggle logic in every handler.

The solution I came up with was to use some inheritance, a static factory, some method hiding, and a custom IModelBinder.

ToggleLocator

I started off by having an abstract base class called ToggleLocator. To start with, it just has two static methods for creating an instance of ToggleLocator:

public abstract class ToggleLocator
{
	public static ToggleLocator Create(Guid toggleID) => new ToggleLocatorByID(toggleID);
	public static ToggleLocator Create(string toggleName) => new ToggleLocatorByName(toggleName);
}

As this is going to be used in both Query handlers and Command handlers, I need to be able to load the Toggle (the EventSourced AggregateRoot), and the ToggleView (the projected current state of the AggregateRoot). So we add two abstract methods to the ToggleLocator

internal abstract ToggleView LocateView(IStorageSession session);
internal abstract Toggle LocateAggregate(IStorageSession session);

Note that not only are these two methods abstract, they are also internal - we don’t want anything outside the domain to know about how a toggle is loaded. I was considering using an privately implemented interface to do this method hiding, but didn’t see the point as I can acomplish the same using the internal methods.

We can now write two implementations of the ToggleLocator. First up is the ToggleLocatorByID, which is very straight forward to implement; we use the ID to load the AggregateRoot directly, and the AllToggles view can be queried by ID to fetch the view version also.

public class ToggleLocatorByID : ToggleLocator
{
	private readonly ToggleID _toggleID;

	public ToggleLocatorByID(ToggleID toggleID)
	{
		_toggleID = toggleID;
	}

	internal override ToggleView LocateView(IStorageSession session) => session
		.LoadProjection<AllToggles>()
		.Toggles
		.SingleOrDefault(view => view.ID == _toggleID);

	internal override Toggle LocateAggregate(IStorageSession session) => session
		.LoadAggregate<Toggle>(_toggleID);
}

The more interesting class to implement is ToggleLocatorByName, as this needs to be able to load an AggregateRoot by name; something which is not directly supported. So to do this we fetch the ToggleView first, and then use the ID property so we can load the Toggle:

public class ToggleLocatorByName : ToggleLocator
{
	private readonly string _toggleName;

	public ToggleLocatorByName(string toggleName)
	{
		_toggleName = toggleName;
	}

	internal override ToggleView LocateView(IStorageSession session) => session
		.LoadProjection<AllToggles>()
		.Toggles
		.SingleOrDefault(t => t.Name.Equals(_toggleName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));

	internal override Toggle LocateAggregate(IStorageSession session)
	{
		var view = LocateView(session);

		return view != null
			? session.LoadAggregate<Toggle>(view.ID)
			: null;
	}
}

All this means that the handlers have no conditionals for loading, they just call the relevant .Locate method:

private Task<UpdateToggleTagsResponse> ModifyTags(ToggleLocator locator, Action<Toggle> modify)
{
	using (var session = _storage.BeginSession())
	{
		var toggle = locator.LocateAggregate(session);
		//or
		var view  = locator.LocateView(session);
		//...
	}
}

And in the controllers, we have separate action methods for each route:

[Route("name/{toggleName}/tags/{tagName}")]
[HttpPut]
public async Task<IActionResult> PutTag(string toggleName, string tagName)
{
	var request = new AddToggleTagRequest(ToggleLocator.Create(toggleName), tagName);
	var response = await _mediator.Send(request);

	return new JsonResult(response.Tags);
}

[Route("id/{toggleID}/tags/{tagName}")]
[HttpPut]
public async Task<IActionResult> PutTag(Guid toggleID, string tagName)
{
	var request = new AddToggleTagRequest(ToggleLocator.Create(ToggleID.Parse(toggleID)), tagName);
	var response = await _mediator.Send(request);

	return new JsonResult(response.Tags);
}

But that is still more duplication than I would like, so lets see if we can resolve this with a custom IModelBinder.

Custom IModelBinder for ToggleLocator

To make a custom model binder, we need to implement two interfaces: IModelBinderProvider and IModelBinder. I am not sure why IModelBinderProvider exists to be perfectly honest, but you need it, and as it is doing nothing particularly interesting, I decided to implement both interfaces in the one class, and just return this from IModelBinderProvider.GetBinder:

public class ToggleLocatorBinder : IModelBinderProvider
{
	public IModelBinder GetBinder(ModelBinderProviderContext context)
	{
		if (context.Metadata.ModelType == typeof(ToggleLocator))
			return this;

		return null;
	}
}

We can then implement the second interface, IModelBinder. Here we check (again) that the parameter is a ToggleLocator, fetch the value which came from the route (or querystring, thanks to the .ValueProvider property).

All I need to do here is try and parse the value as a Guid. If it parses successfully, we create a ToggleLocatorByID instance, otherwise create a ToggleLocatorByName instance.

public class ToggleLocatorBinder : IModelBinderProvider, IModelBinder
{
	public Task BindModelAsync(ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
	{
		if (bindingContext.ModelType != typeof(ToggleLocator))
			return Task.CompletedTask;

		var value = bindingContext.ValueProvider.GetValue(bindingContext.FieldName);
		var guid = Guid.Empty;

		var locator = Guid.TryParse(value.FirstValue, out guid)
			? ToggleLocator.Create(ToggleID.Parse(guid))
			: ToggleLocator.Create(value.FirstValue);

		bindingContext.Result = ModelBindingResult.Success(locator);

		return Task.CompletedTask;
	}
}

We add this into our MVC registration code at the beginning of the ModelBinderProviders collection, as MVC will use the first binder which can support the target type, and there is a binder in the collection somewhere which will handle anything which inherits object…

services.AddMvc(options =>
{
	options.ModelBinderProviders.Insert(0, new ToggleLocatorBinder());
});

Now we can reduce our action methods down to one which handles both routes:

[Route("id/{id}/tags/{tagName}")]
[Route("name/{id}/tags/{tagName}")]
[HttpPut]
public async Task<IActionResult> PutTag(ToggleLocator id, string tagName)
{
	var request = new AddToggleTagRequest(id, tagName);
	var response = await _mediator.Send(request);

	return new JsonResult(response.Tags);
}

Much better, no duplication, and no (obvious) if statements!