Better Software Design with Clean Architecture

Have you ever produced code that:

was bug laden

was painful to debug or enhance with new features

was hard/impossible to test without things like a database or web server

had presentation logic mixed with business logic or business logic mixed in with data access logic (sql)

was hard for other developers to understand because it did not clearly express its intent or purpose within the application it was written for

I know I have. Over time I learned about the various Gang of Four patterns and made a conscious effort to keep the SOLID principles running on a background thread in my mind as I wrote code. While these ideas certainly helped mitigate the problems listed above, they didn't eliminate them. When writing web or desktop software using MVC or MVVM I still found some of the same old symptoms showing up in my projects. Things like business logic leaking into controllers, entity models being used all over the place for different purposes and large regions of the code that had no unit test coverage because they had some sort of direct dependency on a database or http client.

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The answer

One day, a colleague sent around this link introducing The Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob. It resonated with me instantly as it presented a solution for the same problems I was seeing. The best part, there's nothing mystical or complicated about Clean Architecture - it is a relatively simple and practical architecture template that can be applied to many application domains if you choose to follow just a few of its basic rules.

How Clean Architecture works

The key rule behind Clean Architecture is: The Dependency Rule. The gist of this is simply that dependencies are encapsulated in each "ring" of the architecture model and these dependencies can only point inward.

Clean Architecture keeps details like web frameworks and databases in the outer layers while important business rules and policies are housed in the inner circles and have no knowledge of anything outside of themselves. Considering this, you can start to see how it achieves a very clean separation of concerns. By ensuring your business rules and core domain logic in the inner circles are completely devoid of any external dependencies or 3rd party libraries means they must be expressed using pure C# POCO classes which makes testing them much easier.

In fact your business rules simply don’t know anything at all about the outside world.

There are a few other important concepts that I'm going to highlight along the way with an example below but if you're interested in just the theory please go check out Uncle Bob's original post introducing Clean Architecture.

Implementing the "Course Registration" use case

Let's see how this works using a real-world use case. For the folks doing agile scrum, I realize a use case is not the most fashionable way to describe a requirement. But for this post, it's perfect because I'd like to show how all the details of the use case can be modeled within clean architecture. A user story would simply be too vague.

I've typed out the entire use case here for reference so you don't need to digest the whole thing right now. We'll cover its aspects below in detail as we walk through implementing it using clean architecture.

Title Register for courses Description Student accesses the system and views the courses currently available for him to register. Then he selects the courses and registers for them. Primary Actor Student Preconditions Student is logged into system

Student has not previously enrolled or registered

Student cannot register within 5 days of course start date Postconditions Student is registered for courses Main Success Scenario Student selects "Register New Courses" from the menu. System displays list of courses available for registering. Student selects one or more courses he wants to register for. Student clicks "Submit" button. System registers student for the selected courses and displays a confirmation message. Extensions (2a) No courses are available for this student. System displays error message saying no courses are available, and provides the reason & how to rectify if possible. Student either backs out of this use case, or tries again after rectifying the cause.

(5a) Some courses could not be registered. System displays message showing which courses were registered, and which courses were not registered along with a reason for each failure.

(5b) None of the courses could be registered. System displays message saying none of the courses could be registered, along with a reason for each failure.



This is a simple use case allowing a student to register for one or more classes and then returning either a success or error result to notify her of the outcome. We'll use clean architecture to write this use case in a fashion that meets the goals and avoids the problems I mentioned in the intro.

Creating the Entities

Entities are the heart of clean architecture and contain any enterprise-wide business rules and logic. Now, you might not be working in the context of an enterprise and that's perfectly fine. If you're writing a standalone application Uncle Bob suggests simply referring to these as Business Objects. The key is that they contain rules that are not application specific - so basically any global or shareable logic that could be reused in other applications should be encapsulated in an entity.

Inspecting our use case there are 2 entities we need: Student and Course .

Using a TDD approach I wrote a couple of tests and just enough code in the Student entity class to get them passing.

The RegisterForCourse() method implements 2 rules from our use case.

public class Student : EntityBase { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public IList<Course> RegisteredCourses { get; } public IList<Course> EnrolledCourses { get; set; } public Student() { RegisteredCourses = new List<Course>(); EnrolledCourses = new List<Course>(); } public bool RegisterForCourse(Course course) { // student has not previously enrolled if (EnrolledCourses.Any(ec => ec.Code == course.Code)) return false; // registration cannot occur with 5 days of course start date if (DateTime.UtcNow > course.StartDate.AddDays(-5)) return false; RegisteredCourses.Add(course); return true; } }

[Fact] public void CannotRegisterForCourseWithin5DaysOfStartDate() { // arrange var student = new Student(); var course = new Course { Code = "BIOL-1507EL", Name = "Biology II", StartDate = DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(+3) }; // act var result = student.RegisterForCourse(course); // assert Assert.False(result); } [Fact] public void CannotRegisterForCourseAlreadyEnrolledIn() { // arrange var student = new Student { EnrolledCourses = new List<Course> { new Course { Code = "BIOL-1507EL", Name = "Biology II" }, new Course { Code = "MATH-4067EL", Name = "Mathematical Theory of Dynamical Systems, Chaos and Fractals" } } }; // act var result = student.RegisterForCourse(new Course { Code = "BIOL-1507EL" }); // assert Assert.False(result); }

Use Cases

Moving up from the entities we have the Use Case layer. The classes that live here have a few unique features and responsibilities:

Contain the application specific business rules

Encapsulate and implement all of the use cases of the system. A good rule to start with is a class per use case

Orchestrate the flow of data to and from the entities, and can rely on their business rules to achieve the goals of the use case

Have NO dependency and are totally isolated from things like a database, UI or special frameworks

Will almost certainly require refactoring if details of the use case requirements change

Use case classes are typically suffixed with the word Interactor. Uncle Bob mentions in this talk that he considered calling them controllers but assumed this would be too easily confused with MVC so Interactor it is!

Our use case is modelled in RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor.cs.

There are a few important aspects of the use case class I'd like to highlight.

First off, it implements the IRequestHandler interface. This interface is an example of the mediator pattern which dictates that implementors will work with a certain request and response object in a loosely coupled fashion.

public class RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor : IRequestHandler<CourseRegistrationRequestMessage, CourseRegistrationResponseMessage> ...

There is a single TResponse Handle(TRequest message) method defined on the interface which essentially performs all the work of our use case. Pretty simple huh? Handle() takes a request object as its lone parameter which will typically contain any data passed in from the outer layer (the UI) and returns a response message with both types dictated by the IRequestHandler interface. All of our application specific logic for the use case will go into this method.

One key aspect of the request/response messages that flow in and out of use case interactors and across boundaries is that they are simple data structures meaning they contain no special types: ie. entities, or types provided by 3rd party libs etc. - they are pure C# objects.

public class CourseRegistrationRequestMessage : IRequest<CourseRegistrationResponseMessage> { public int StudentId { get; private set; } public List<string> SelectedCourseCodes { get; private set; } public CourseRegistrationRequestMessage(int studentId,List<string> selectedCourseCodes) { StudentId = studentId; SelectedCourseCodes = selectedCourseCodes; } }

The CourseRegistrationRequest object consists of only a StudentId and a list of selected course codes selected by the user.

Here's the full implementation of RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor.cs

public class RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor : IRequestHandler<CourseRegistrationRequestMessage, CourseRegistrationResponseMessage> { private readonly IStudentRepository _studentRepository; private readonly ICourseRepository _courseRepository; private readonly IAuthService _authService; public RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor(IAuthService authService, IStudentRepository studentRepository, ICourseRepository courseRepository) { _authService = authService; _studentRepository = studentRepository; _courseRepository = courseRepository; } public CourseRegistrationResponseMessage Handle(CourseRegistrationRequestMessage message) { // student must be logged into system if (!_authService.IsAuthenticated()) { return new CourseRegistrationResponseMessage(false,null,"Operation failed, not authenticated."); } // get the student var student = _studentRepository.GetById(message.StudentId); // save off any failures var errors = new List<string>(); foreach (var c in message.SelectedCourseCodes) { var course = _courseRepository.GetByCode(c); if (!student.RegisterForCourse(course)) { errors.Add($"unable to register for {course.Code}"); } } _studentRepository.Save(student); return new CourseRegistrationResponseMessage(!errors.Any(), errors); }

Note the use of _authService , _studentRepository and _courseRepository . These services are typically referred to as Gateways within clean architecture and get injected into the Use Case layer as per the dependency rule. These are the things that deal with the database, rest services or other external agencies and their implementation belongs in the Interface Adapters layer. Interactors only know what behavior these gateways offer by way of their interface definition. They have no idea how they do their work because those details are encapsulated in an outer layer which the Use Cases know nothing about.

Interface Adapters

The purpose of the interface adapter layer is to act as a connector between the business logic in our interactors and our framework-specific code. For example, in an ASP.Net MVC app, this is where the models, views, and controllers live. Gateways like services and repositories are also implemented here.

It is this layer, for example, that will wholly contain the MVC architecture of a GUI. The Presenters, Views, and Controllers all belong in here. Also in this layer is any other adapter necessary to convert data from some external form, such as an external service, to the internal form used by the use cases and entities.

In this example I'm using a basic console app to consume my use case so this serves as my interface adapter layer. It contains the concrete implementations of the required Gateways and has Presentation logic to format the response from the Use Case into something friendly for the UI.

In the Main() method we can see the usage of calling the use case and presenting the results.

//************************************************************************************************* // Here we're connecting our app framework layer with our Use Case Interactors // This would typically go in a Controller Action in an MVC context or ViewModel in MVVM etc. //************************************************************************************************* // 1. instantiate Course Registration Use Case injecting Gateways implemented in this layer var courseRegistraionRequestUseCase = new RequestCourseRegistrationInteractor(authService, studentRepository, courseRepository); // 2. create the request message passing with the target student id and a list of selected course codes var useCaseRequestMessage = new CourseRegistrationRequestMessage(1, new List<string> { userInput.ToUpper() }); // 3. call the use case and store the response var responseMessage = courseRegistraionRequestUseCase.Handle(useCaseRequestMessage); // 4. use a Presenter to convert the use case response to a user friendly ViewModel var courseRegistraionResponsePresenter = new CourseRegistrationRequestResponsePresenter(); var vm = courseRegistraionResponsePresenter.Handle(responseMessage); Console.Clear(); // render results if (vm.Success) { Console.BackgroundColor = ConsoleColor.DarkGreen; Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.White; } else { Console.BackgroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red; Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.White; } Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine(vm.ResultMessage); Console.WriteLine();

Presentation

We'd like to show something friendly to the user when we get a response back from the interactor. To accomplish this, I created CourseRegistrationResponsePresenter which has the single responsibility of converting a CourseRegistrationResponseMessage into a CourseRegistrationResponseViewModel. I'll mention again that the response message and viewmodel are POCO objects containing no special types or data structures, just everyday collection and value types.

public class CourseRegistrationResponsePresenter { public CourseRegistrationResponseViewModel Handle(CourseRegistrationResponseMessage responseMessage) { if (responseMessage.Success) { return new CourseRegistrationResponseViewModel(true,"Course registration successful!"); } var sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.AppendLine("Failed to register course(s)"); foreach (var e in responseMessage.Errors) { sb.AppendLine(e); } return new CourseRegistrationResponseViewModel(false,sb.ToString()); } }

Frameworks and Drivers

This layer contains tools like databases or frameworks. By default, we don’t write very much code in this layer, but it’s important to clearly state the place and priority that those tools have in the architecture.

Summary

Clean Architecture provides a simple and effective framework for separating the different aspects of our system producing a highly decoupled, testable architecture.

Let's recap some key benefits:

Use Cases are encapsulated in one place meaning they are very visible and easier to understand . Business rules are not scattered all over the place making debugging and modification of the code painful.

The Dependency Rule and use of abstracted Gateways mean the core business logic in our Interactors and Entities is easily testable and not hampered by external things like databases and RESTful web services. The lack of 3rd party, feature-laden frameworks in our business logic also means the code there is only focused on the important rules and policies of our application .

Flexible and portable - because the Use Cases are completely decoupled from any UI or infrastructure it's easy to do things like switch the database or web framework or even port to an entirely new platform. Our example runs in a console app but it could just as easily work on the web, desktop or a phone.

Like most design decisions there are tradeoffs to be made when considering Clean Architecture. For the benefits I highlighted there are also a few disadvantages:

Your team's ability to ramp up and effectively apply Clean Architecture. There's nothing radically complex in here but there certainly is a learning curve and time required to adapt to any new design or architectural style.

Applying Clean Architecture adds some bloat in the form of many separate classes for all the Presenters, Use Case Request/Response dtos, Use Case Interactors, Entities, Gateways etc plus all the test cases :). Not a huge deal but a valid knock on the impact of this approach to the size of your project.

I hope this guide has provided some insight on how Clean Architecture can improve your software design and prevent many of the common pitfalls that hinder projects. Like any pattern, it takes a little familiarity with the concepts and principles before they can be effectively applied. A good exercise to start might be to think of some use cases near and dear to you currently - can you map them out mentally using Clean Architecture? Do you have a sense of the Entities, what the Use Case Interactor might look like, what data needs to flow back and forth in the request and response messages? Running your use cases through these questions can help you get started in modeling them using Clean Architecture.

Thanks for reading!

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