Why Entity Framework renders the Repository pattern obsolete?

A post here on a pattern I thought was obsolete yet I still see cropping up in projects using EF time and time again…

What is a Repository?

The repository pattern – to me – is just a form of data access gateway. We used it to provide both a form of abstraction above the details of data access, as well as to provide testability to your calling clients, e.g. services or perhaps even view models / controllers. A typical repository will have methods such as the following:-

interface IRepository
{
    T GetById(Int32 id);
    T Insert(T item);
    T Update(T item);
    T Delete(T item);
}

interface ICustomerRepository : IRepository
{
    Customer GetByName(String name);
}

And so on. You’ll probably create a Repository<T> class which does the basic CRUD work for any <T>. Each one of these repositories will delegate to an EF ObjectContext (or DbContext for newer EF versions), and they’ll offer you absolutely nothing. Allow me to explain…

Getting to EF data in Services

Let’s illustrate the two different approaches with a simple example service method that gets the first customer whose name is an arbitrary string. In terms of objects and responsibilities, the two approaches are somewhat different. Here’s the Repository version: –

public class Service
{
    private readonly ICustomerRepository customerRepository;
    public Customer GetCustomer(String customerName)
    {
        return customerRepository.GetByName(customerName);
    }
}
public class CustomerRepository : ICustomerRepository
{
    private readonly DatabaseContext context;
    public Customer GetByName(string customerName)
    {
        return context.Customers.First(c => c.Name == customerName);
    }
}

Using the Repository pattern, you generally abstract out your actual query so that your service does any “business logic” e.g. validation etc. and then orchestrates repository calls e.g. Get customer 4, Amend name, Update customer 4 etc. etc.. You’ll also invariably end up templating (which if you read my blog regularly you know I hate) your Repositories for common logic like First, Where etc.. – all these methods will just delegate onto the equivalent method on DbSet.

If you go with the approach of talking to EF directly, you enter your queries directly in your service layer. There’s no abstraction layer between the service and EF.

public class ServiceTwo
{
    private readonly DatabaseContext context;

    Customer GetCustomer(String customerName)
    {
        return context.Customers.First(c => c.Name == customerName);
    }
}

So there’s now just one class, the service, which is coupled to DatabaseContext rather than CustomerRepository; we perform the query directly in the service. Notice also that Context contains all our repositories e.g. Customers, Orders etc. as a single dependency rather than one per type. Why would we want to do this? Well, you cut out a layer of indirection, reduce the number of classes you have (i.e. the whole Repository hierarchy vs a fake DbContext + Set), making your code quicker to write as well as easier to reason about.

Aha! Surely now we can’t test out our services because we’re coupled to EF! And aren’t we violating SRP by putting our queries directly into our service? I say “no” to both.

Testability without Repository

How do we fix the first issue, that of testability? There are actually many good examples online for this, but essentially, think about this – what is DbContext? At it’s most basic, it’s a class which contains multiple properties, each implementing IDbSet<T> (notice – IDbSet, not DbSet). What is IDbSet<T>? It’s the same thing as our old friend, IRepository<T>. It contains methods to Add, Delete etc. etc., and in addition implements IQueryable<T> – so you get basically the whole LINQ query set including things like First, Single, Where etc. etc.

Because DBSet<T> implements the interface IDbSet<T>, you can write your own one which uses e.g. in-memory List<T> as a backing store instead. This way your service methods can work against in-memory lists during unit tests (easy to generate test data, easy to prove tests for), whilst going against the real DBContext at runtime. You don’t need to play around with mocking frameworks – in your unit tests you can simply generate fake data and place them into your fake DBSet lists.

I know that some people whinge about this saying “it doesn’t prove the real SQL that EF will generate; it won’t test performance etc. That’s true – however, this approach doesn’t try to solve that – what it does try to do is to remove the unnecessary IRepository layer and reduce friction, whilst improving testability – for 90% of your EF queries e.g. Where, First, GroupBy etc., this will work just fine.

Violation of SRP

This one is trickier. You ideally want to be able to reuse your queries across service methods – how do we do that if we’re writing our queries inline of the service? The answer is – be pramatic. If you have a query that is used once and once only, or a few times but is a simple Where clause – don’t bother refactoring for reuse.

If, on the other hand you have a large query that is being used in many places and is difficult to test, consider making a mockable query builder that takes in an IQueryable, composes on top of it and then returns another IQueryable back out. This allows you to create common queries yet still be flexible in their application – whilst still giving you the ability to go directly to your EF context.

Conclusion

Testability is important when writing EF-based data-driven services. However, the Repository pattern offers little when you can write your services directly against a testable EF context. You can in fact get much better testability from an service-with-an-EF-context based approach than just with a repository, as you can test out your LINQ queries against a fake context, which at least proves your query represents what you want semantically. It’s still not a 100% tested solution, because your code does not test out the EF IQueryable provider – so it’s important that you still have some form of integration and / or performance tests against your services.