CQRS: how do you retrieve information about an executed command? - cqrs

In most command interfaces I've seen, there is typically an "Execute" method which takes takes a command input and either returns void or some generic structure indicating if the command executed successfully or not (we are using the latter). Now, I've never thought of this before, but we suddenly got the need to know some more details about the result of the command than what you can expose generically.
Consider the following example:
you have a team and you are creating a screen where you can add members to your team. The members of the team are shown in a grid below the "add new member"-stuff. Now, when you press "add new member" you want to run some jquery/roundohuse/whatever and add the new member to the list of team members. No problems so far, but: you also want to include some identification data in a hidden field for each member and this id-data comes from the server.
So the problem is: how can I get that id-data from the server? The "AddNewTeamMember" command which I am pushing through the "ExecuteCommand"-method does not give me anything useful back, and if I add a new query method to the service saying something like: "GetLastAddedTeamMember" then I might just get the last entry added by someone else (at least if this is data which is very aggressively added by different users). In some situations you have a natural unique identifier generated on the client side which we can use, but for team members we did not.

Given that you have no choice but to update an on-page widget when another command completes, I see two choices for you:
Shoot off the command, display something locally that indicates it is submitted, and then wait until you get a notification from the server that the team member list has changed. Update the widget to reflect that.
Add a correlation ID to your command when you submit it, and add the team member provisionally locally to the list. When you get a confirmation from the server that a team member update happened because of your correlation ID, update your local data.
I would suggest the first approach, where the "provisional indicator" could be throwing a marked version of the normal indication into place; then, when you finally get an update you should have the data you need.
Given you went with CQRS to solve this problem I assume you have frequent updates to the content of those widgets happening in the background already, so have presumably solved the "background update" problem.
If not, I suggest you either ditch CQRS as a bad - over-complicated - solution in your problem space, or solve the background update problem first.

If you want to add an existing team member, you should query the read side of your application for this data. If you need to add a new team member, you have to consider if it's necessary to show the user in the grid below at once. Can you wait until the team member is in place on the read side? You can also query a service on the server side to get an unique ID (it can return a GUID). Then you add the team member to the grid, and of course, send the command to the server. But, if it's possible, try to design the application in a way that you don't have to show the team member at once. It's also possible to give the user a message saying something like this: "Team member added, waiting for response from server.". Then use AJAX to query the read side for new team members. When it appears on the read side, show it in the grid. You might have to deal with team members added by other users, but does it matter? CQRS gives you a great way to collaborate with other users, so maybe you should take advantage of that. As I see it; CQRS forces you to think different, and that may not be a bad thing.

Related

Test fail in IFTTT with "returns at least three items"

I'm creating my own service and in the endpoint test fails here and this error is shown:
"returns at least three items"
This error comes from the trigger part.
Can somebody share a sample value of output with three items in it. Please help
IFTTT Expects you to send at least 3 result items, to skip just clone the same object twice with different ids.
From the FAQ section;
My service fails the returns at least three items endpoint test. Why does IFTTT require three items? We require three items during the
testing phase to make sure your API behaves like a timeline of events,
not a state engine.
This requirement might seem strange when you think of your integration
with IFTTT as something that is entirely realtime in nature, like “IF
Button Pressed, THEN Turn On Lights”— what good would come from
anything but the current state of the button?
But what about the Applet “IF Button Pressed, THEN Log to
Spreadsheet”? In this case it would be important to store and return
multiple event items because there is no guarantee that we’ll call
your API (even with the Realtime API) at the moment the event occurs.
By keeping and returning a list of events, IFTTT users are more
assured they won’t miss a thing.

What's the accepted pattern for global, updatable data?

I've gone through several tutorials on Flutter and I find that they cover basics just fine but there are some nagging aspects of good design and good architecture that are consistently missing. I'm writing my first actual (not toy) application in Flutter and find myself running into these missing points.
Global data. Once a person installs the application and tries to use it, I ask them to log in / create an account, since this is an application specifically for managing groups of people. I'm using Firebase on the back end, and the package to do authentication winds up returning Future<FirebaseUser> from everything. So, yes, when it comes to building a Widget that uses the user's data, I can use a FutureBuilder. That said, it seems weird to have to keep typing boilerplate FutureBuilder code to dereference the user every place I want to use the user's ID to look up their data (what groups are they part of, what actions do they have pending, etc.). I really feel like there ought to be a way to invoke the future, get the actual user object, and then store it somewhere so that anything that wants a user ID for a query can just go get it. What's the right solution? I can't believe I'm the only person who has this problem.
Updatable data. I've got a page where I list the groups the current user is a member of. The user, though, can create a new group, join an existing group, or leave a group. When they do that, I need to redraw the page. The list of groups comes from running a Firebase query, so performing an action (join, leave, etc.) should signal the app to redraw the page, which will have the side effect of re-running the query. Conceivably, one might make the page dependent (how?) on the query results and have it redraw whenever they update, and instead have some widget somewhere that keeps track of the query. There's another answer here that hints that this might be the right way to go, but that's really concerned with relatively invariant data (locale doesn't change all that often for a single user). So, again, I can't believe I'm the only one who does this sort of thing. What's the best practice in this case?

GWT Editors: How to record changes to fields and sub-editors? (RequestFactory?)

I have an app that makes extensive use of the Editor Framework. Right now I'm at the point where I want to add a new feature: if a user edits an entity, I'd like to record which changes were made and store them in a separate datastore entity. This requires knowing if a field was changed, the field name, and the value it was changed to.
This is what I'd like to implement:
App calls edit(bean);
User makes changes, calls flush() and data gets sent back to server.
In server handler, changes from the bean are sent to processChanges(List<String> paths) which then creates and stores the record that "field foo" was changed to "bar", and so on.
The entity is saved, overwriting the existing one.
I use GWTP and currently use the RPC Command Pattern. I've read a bit about RequestFactory and as I understand, one of its main benefits is that it only sends the changed fields known as "deltas" back to the server to minimise the payload, so I'm wondering if using RequestFactory would be a better fit for my app?
Apologies - I've been reading through the GWT docs and Javadocs for the Editor Framework and RequestFactory but I'm still pretty confused. RequestFactoryEditorDriver.getPaths() seems like it might be what I need but any advice or pointers greatly appreciated.
I could probably watch for changes client-side but that seems like a bad idea.
I believe you could do that using an EditorVisitor, similar to the DirtCollector visitor used internally by the Editor framework (have a look at the PathCollector for how to collect paths in a visitor).
I would start by visiting the hierarchy to collect the initial values just after the call to edit() (this is done already by the DirtCollector internally, but there's no way to access its results, and it only collects leaf values anyway).
Then you could call flush() ans see whether there are errors, and possibly validated your object to see if everything's OK. Then you visit the hierarchy again to collect the changes (against the initial values you previously collected) so you can send them to the server.

Rally rest API transactions

Is there any way to achieve an atomic transaction using the Rally wsapi. I know a transaction implies state among the consecutive requests, but REST obviously is a stateless protocol. So that might be an issue.
need to be able to pull a portfolioitem/feature and then immediately write it back if I have the most recent version of it. I have a custom field on portfolioitem/feature that WILL be edited by multiple people simultaneously, and I need to make sure that each update happens in the correct order.
Since i don't have access to Rally's server stuff, i must do all this client side, and I can't figure out how to do this. I will be doing this will the Rally SDK also.
I don't think WS API supports atomic transactions. A scenario where updates occur as one atomic transaction so that, for example, if one of the updates fail they are all rolled back is not supported. In the example you mentioned each update will be a distinct transaction and in case of a mid-air collision when the same artifact is updated by different users, one of the users will receive a concurrency error.
I am in the same boat as the OP, the only difference being that hours may pass between the read and subsequent write. Interestingly, I only seem to get concurrency errors when I attempt to update a record while there's another transaction of mine in flight. I don't see any exception raised when I am updating a record using a stale version thereof, i.e. one that someone else has changed from under me.
I will be attempting to fix this soon as it's becoming an issue. The chosen approach is to forcibly chain a GET before every POST, and throw an exception if the VersionID of the record I GET doesn't match the one I have stored in-memory. In case of mismatch, it will refresh the local record (and thus, view) and prompt the user to resubmit their changes. Yes this will be inconvenient for a user but in my app most changes are a single click away so it's reasonable.
I too would like to know if there is a better approach to this problem. One would assume that with every record having a VersionID, it would be handled server-side, with proper support from WsapiProxy on the client end. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, like explicitly fetching VersionID?

New/Read Flags in CQRS

I am currently drafting a concept for a (mostly) HTML-based collaboration suite which I plan to implement using CQRS. This software will contain messages that can be sent to the user (which can either be read or unread, obviously) and other elements which shall be marked "new" if they were created after the last user login.
Hardly something new, but I am not quite sure how that would be correctly implemented using CQRS. As I understand it, Change of any kind should, without exception, only be possible via Commands. But creating commands for every single (new) element that is being accessed seems a bit too much, not to mention the overhead.
I don't know if I need it, but what would be the best way to implement a Last-Accessed Timestamp on elements. Basically the same problem like the above, with the difference that the change happens EVERY time the element is accessed, not only the first time for each user.
CQRS seems to be an awesome concept but it really needs more learning material. Can't wait till a book is released :)
Regards
[Edit] No one? Wouldn't have thought that this is such a complicated issue..
I assume you're using event-sourcing in which case once you allow your query-service/event-handlers to raise appropriate events then this becomes fairly easy to solve.
For your messages/elements; when handling the specific creation events of your elements either add to existing or create additional event-handlers, to store to a messages read-model with a status of new and appropriate information about the element.
As part of you're user login I don't see why you can't raise a user-logged-in event (from the security/query service depending on how your implementing authentication) to say the user has logged in. An event-handler could capture this and write the last-login timestamp to a specific user-last-login read-model.
In addition the user-logged-in event-handler would need to update all the new messages (for that user) to an unread status. Seeing as we're changing the status of the messages as the user logs in do you still need to store the last-login timestamp?
For your last-accessed timestamp, perhaps you could just work this into your query service as queries for your different elements complete. Raise a query-completed event with element id/type information.