How to Build Microservices with Onion Architecture: Hands-On Experience
Onion architecture implements this concept and dramatically increases code quality, reduces complexity and enables evolutionary enterprise systems. I recently started to learn .Net Core and found that there is what is called clean architecture and knew nothing about it. You have made it clear and simple though yet not confident with it because I know the coding part will be application-specific and hence will differ here and there. I am pleased with this Onion architecture and I wish to follow it more and more by implementing it in all my projects.
We have connected all of our Onion architecture implementation layers, and our application is now ready for use. We’ve shown you how to implement the Domain layer, Service layer, and Infrastructure layer. Also, we’ve onion software architecture shown you the Presentation layer implementation by decoupling the controllers from the main Web application. The obvious advantage of the Onion architecture is that our controller’s methods become very thin.
Presentation Layer
We are hiding all the implementation details in the Infrastructure layer because it is at the top of the Onion architecture, while all of the lower layers depend on the interfaces . The Domain layer does not have any direct dependencies on the outside layers. The outer layers are all allowed to reference the layers that are directly below them in the hierarchy. The program can easily be expanded with additional features and capabilities because of its modular architecture without affecting the primary domain layer. If you apply a change to the core, it will affect all the outer layers. That’s because the whole application focuses on logic, so any wrong action could break it down.
- In addition to ensuring that the program is operating properly, this also makes it simpler to find and repair errors.
- The actual type of database and the way of storing data is determined at the upper infrastructure level.
- I have already written a detailed article on MediatR and CQRS patterns in ASP.NET Core 3.1 WebApi Project.
- Onion Architecture layers are connected through interfaces.
- For onion architecture, try searching for examples of ports & adapters and hexagonal architectures.
A proper DDD application will scream domain and not framework. When you look at the code you will see an accounting system or a scheduling system, not a DDD system. Multiple small Domain Model components/services SHOULD be used instead of having large Use Case classes. The application layer SHOULD only know about the Domain Model layer and nothing about the Presentation or Infrastructure ones.
How we observe, monitor and improve the operational performance of our applications
We will have to register IApplicationDBContext and bind it to ApplicationDbContext, right? Similar to the Application layer, we will have to create a new class just to register the dependencies and services of this layer to the service container. You can see the clear separation of concerns as we have read earlier. Maybe an Entity Framework Core Layer for Accessing the DB, a Layer specifically made to generate JWT Tokens for Authentication or even a Hangfire Layer. You will understand more when we start Implementing Onion Architecture in ASP.NET Core WebApi Project. I hope this article helps you to develop proper coding discipline across the team and justify the necessity of additional interfaces for functions, related to application boundaries.

Martin Fowler, in his article Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern, helps to understand how pattern works. At runtime, the IoC container will resolve the classes that implement interfaces and pass them into the SpeakerController constructor. At this point in time, the SpeakerController can do its job. I would suggest you take each part, starting with entity, aggregate root, application boundary and repository and start implementing them 1 by 1. When you get stuck, look for solutions to your specific problem.
System Design Blueprint: The Ultimate Guide
I didn’t add any library like AutoMapper or similar because I wanted to remain agnostic about that. If you want to use AutoMapper or any similar NuGet package feel free. These guidelines are crucial because they free developers from the burden of sifting through a maze of disorganized code in order to swiftly add new features and solve errors. Onion architecture provides better testability because a unit test can be created for individual layers without being influenced by other modules in the application. Any specific implementation will be provided to the application at runtime.
Then, you need to implement the Transfer feature, which involves two Accounts. There are some cases where it’s hard to fit a behavior into a single domain model. The domain layer https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ is the innermost layer of the architecture. Domain-driven design is the concept that developers and domain experts should use the same names both in code and business domain.
CleanArchitecture
In the case of Onion Architecture, I see things pretty similarly as in the Hexagonal one. I’m not sure if that’s an Onion Architecture already, it depends on your interpretation. On the other hand, we have the monoliths, which contain much more dependencies and services depend on one another on the code level.

Onion architecture is the division of an application into layers. Moreover, there is one independent level, which is in the center of the architecture. The second level depends on this level, the third depends on the second, and so on. That is, it turns out that around the first independent level, the second dependent is layered.
The architecture comprises four layers:
I just wonder and want to know why all the samples we found with Entity framework? I have a big project to start and wish to write the logic in SQL stored procedures. Stored procedures because we find the easy maintenance and also easy to write the logic.

In this case, you’ll probably find much more outward dependencies to replace with interfaces. And there’s my framework dilemma, which I keep coming back to, mostly because of Uncle Bob’s writings that suggest that Onion and Hexagonal Architectures avoid framework dependencies. Hence, I’d say that to some extent all of us should take from Onion Architecture, but that extent should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Adding the Required Interfaces And Packages in Application Layer
When all your business rules are in domain services instead of in your domain models, probably you have an Anemic Domain Model. However, given the heart of the architecture being a domain model, I would say that you should definitely avoid mixing it with those less important concerns like UI. As per traditional architecture, the UI layer interacts to business logic, and business logic talks to the data layer, and all the layers are mixed up and depend heavily on each other. In 3-tier and n-tier architectures, none of the layers are independent; this fact raises a separation of concerns. The drawback of this traditional architecture is unnecessary coupling. Using this approach, we can encapsulate all of the rich business logic in the Domain and Service layers without ever having to know any implementation details.

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