I'm not going to answer your question directly (sorry), but I want to offer what I believe to be some important insight about CSLA.
In version 3.6 I've introduced the ability to have the data portal invoke an external object factory rather than the business object. You can read about it here
http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/CSLANETObjectFactoryAttribute.aspx
The primary purpose behind this change is to enable some potential scenarios around ORM tools, and other object<->data mapping schemes. In particular, I'm hopeful that future versions of the Entity Framework may be able to leverage this capability in interesting ways.
A secondary benefit is to open more avenues for testing by providing formalized separation between the business and data access layers.
I’m just saying that this is an option. The factory object
would be responsible for creating an instance of your business object(s) and
loading the data using whatever scheme you want to use (reflection, internal
interfaces, etc). If you really dig into that area you’ll find that it is
a challenging scenario, but it can be done.
If you want better layer separation with the DataPortal_XYZ
approach, you should look at the DeepData example. The best approaches (imo)
are to create a DAL that returns a datareader (the object doesn’t know
from where), or a DTO.
Rocky
RockfordLhotka:
...
In version 3.6 I've introduced the ability to have the data portal invoke an external object factory rather than the business object. You can read about it here
http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/CSLANETObjectFactoryAttribute.aspxThe primary purpose behind this change is to enable some potential scenarios around ORM tools, and other object<->data mapping schemes. In particular, I'm hopeful that future versions of the Entity Framework may be able to leverage this capability in interesting ways.
...
I ran into this very issue with CSLA 2.1 using the Wilson ORMapper. I was trying to implement DataPortal_Fetch, but the problem was that CSLA handed me the object to populate, and I wanted to create the object myself. (I was translating from the NHibernate sample, and evidently NHiberate will let you do this directly, but the Wilson ORM won't)
My solution at the time, which I found distasteful but works, was to let the ORM fetch a *different* copy of the object directly, and then copy the fields from this fetched object to the one CSLA was asking me to populate. The object generated for this particular mapper support an interface that will let you do this fairly efficiently without reflection, but I can see how this would be a problem if the interface weren't available.
I'm glad to see direct support for this is coming, but depending on your framework, it may be possible to use CSLA as is and work around lack of custom factory support.
StructureMap is not an orm, it is a dependency injection framework. So you would not use it to do persistance, but use it to remove dependencies between objects. As far as testing goes, it really depends on what your development style is going to be. If you are doing TDD, it is going to be kind of painful with CSLA (there are just to many things going on in each object), but you can look at this link to see how it could work: http://www.nermins.net/post/2007/05/TDDUsing-Mock-objects-with-CSLANet-(Round-II).aspx.
If you are just doing unit testing (testing after your code is written) then you could populate your database in a known state and write your test from there. This does become difficult since you have to keep up with the data in your database and rollback the data into a know state after each test (mbUnit has a rollback attribute which makes this real easy) and in between each test run. If you are testing like this you really don't have much of a need for something like RhinoMocks unless you want to start testing interactions between object/components.
In the end you need to find what works best for you. This maybe doing TDD without CSLA or it might be just using CSLA. If I was you I would spike out a small prototype using CSLA and then try it using TDD. In the end it really boils down to what works for you. Hope this helps.
Mike
If you are looking for a mocking tool then I would look closely at typemock. I am currently using the free version in my tests, to mock the dal calls to the database. Since I use ADO in my business objects, I can now easily use a dataset or datatable to return the IDataReader my business objects are expecting. I ran in to a couple of minor issues in getting things set up correctly, but it now works like a charm.
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