How to make the members of my Data Access Layer object aware of their siblings
- by Graham
My team currently has a project with a data access object composed like so:
public abstract class DataProvider
{
public CustomerRepository CustomerRepo { get; private set; }
public InvoiceRepository InvoiceRepo { get; private set; }
public InventoryRepository InventoryRepo { get; private set; }
// couple more like the above
}
We have non-abstract classes that inherit from DataProvider, and the type of "CustomerRepo" that gets instantiated is controlled by that child class.
public class FloridaDataProvider
{
public FloridaDataProvider()
{
CustomerRepo = new FloridaCustomerRepo(); // derived from base CustomerRepository
InvoiceRepo = new InvoiceRespository();
InventoryRepo = new InventoryRepository();
}
}
Our problem is that some of the methods inside a given repo really would benefit from having access to the other repo's. Like, a method inside InventoryRepository needs to get to Customer data to do some determinations, so I need to pass in a reference to a CustomerRepository object.
Whats the best way for these "sibling" repos to be aware of each other and have the ability to call each other's methods as-needed? Virtually all the other repos would benefit from having the CustomerRepo, for example, because it is where names/phones/etc are selected from, and these data elements need to be added to the various objects that are returned out of the other repos.
I can't just new-up a plain "CustomerRepository" object inside a method within a different repo, because it might not be the base CustomerRepository that actually needs to run.
