a. Reference Objects)

Entities (a.k.a. Reference Objects)

Many objects are not fundamentally defined by their attributes, but rather by a thread of continuity and identity.

A landlady sued me, claiming major damages to her property. The papers I was served described an apartment with holes in the walls, stains on the carpet, and a noxious liquid in the sink that gave off caustic fumes that had made the kitchen wallpaper peel. The court documents named me as the tenant responsible for the damages, identifying me by name and by my then-current address. This was confusing to me, because I had never even visited that ruined place.

After a moment, I realized that it must be a case of mistaken identity. I called the plaintiff and told her this, but she didn't believe me. The former tenant had been eluding her for months. How could I prove that I was not the same person who had cost her so much money? I was the only Eric Evans in the phone book.

Well, the phone book turned out to be my salvation. Because I had been living in the same apartment for two years, I asked her if she still had the previous year's book. After she found it and verified that my listing was the same (right next to my namesake's listing), she realized that I was not the person she wanted to sue, apologized, and promised to drop the case.

Computers are not that resourceful. A case of mistaken identity in a software system leads to data corruption and program errors.

There are special technical challenges here, which I'll discuss in a bit, but first let's look at the fundamental issue: Many things are defined by their identity, and not by any attribute. In our typical conception, a person (to continue with the nontechnical example) has an identity that stretches from birth to death and even beyond. That person's physical attributes transform and ultimately disappear. The name may change. Financial relationships come and go. There is not a single attribute of a person that cannot change; yet the identity persists. Am I the same person I was at age five? This kind of metaphysical question is important in the search for effective domain models. Slightly rephrased: Does the user of the application care if I am the same person I was at age five?

In a software system for tracking accounts due, that modest "customer" object may have a more colorful side. It accumulates status by prompt payment or is turned over to a bill-collection agency for failure to pay. It may lead a double life in another system altogether when the sales force extracts customer data into its contact management software. In any case, it is unceremoniously squashed flat to be stored in a database table. When new business stops flowing from that source, the customer object will be retired to an archive, a shadow of its former self.

Each of these forms of the customer is a different implementation based on a different programming language and technology. But when a phone call comes in with an order, it is important to know: Is this the customer who has the delinquent account? Is this the customer that Jack (a particular sales representative) has been working with for weeks? Is this a completely new customer?

A conceptual identity has to be matched between multiple implementations of the objects, its stored forms, and real-world actors such as the phone caller. Attributes may not match. A sales representative may have entered an address update into the contact software, which is just being propagated to accounts due. Two customer contacts may have the same name. In distributed software, multiple users could be entering data from different sources, causing update transactions to propagate through the system to be reconciled in different databases asynchronously.

Object modeling tends to lead us to focus on the attributes of an object, but the fundamental concept of an ENTITY is an abstract continuity threading through a life cycle and even passing through multiple forms.

Some objects are not defined primarily by their attributes. They represent a thread of identity that runs through time and often across distinct representations. Sometimes such an object must be matched with another object even though attributes differ. An object must be distinguished from other objects even though they might have the same attributes. Mistaken identity can lead to data corruption.

An object defined primarily by its identity is called an ENTITY.^[1] ENTITIES have special modeling and design considerations. They have life cycles that can radically change their form and content, but a thread of continuity must be maintained. Their identities must be defined so that they can be effectively tracked. Their class definitions, responsibilities, attributes, and associations should revolve around who they are, rather than the particular attributes they carry. Even for ENTITIES that don't transform so radically or have such complicated life cycles, placing them in the semantic category leads to more lucid models and more robust implementations.

^[1] A model ENTITY is not the same thing as a Java "entity bean." Entity beans were meant as a framework for implementing ENTITIES, more or less, but it hasn't worked out that way. Most ENTITIES are implemented as ordinary objects. Regardless of how they are implemented, ENTITIES are a fundamental distinction in a domain model.

Of course, most "ENTITIES" in a software system are not people or entities in the usual sense of the word. An ENTITY is anything that has continuity through a life cycle and distinctions independent of attributes that are important to the application's user. It could be a person, a city, a car, a lottery ticket, or a bank transaction.

On the other hand, not all objects in the model are ENTITIES, with meaningful identities. This issue is confused by the fact that object-oriented languages build "identity" operations into every object (for example, the "==" operator in Java). These operations determine if two references point to the same object by comparing their location in memory or by some other mechanism. In this sense, every object instance has identity. In the domain of, say, creating a Java runtime environment or a technical framework for caching remote objects locally, every object instance may indeed be an ENTITY. But this identity mechanism means very little in other application domains. Identity is a subtle and meaningful attribute of ENTITIES, which can't be turned over to the automatic features of the language.

Consider transactions in a banking application. Two deposits of the same amount to the same account on the same day are still distinct transactions, so they have identity and are ENTITIES. On the other hand, the amount attributes of those two transactions are probably instances of some money object. These values have no identity, since there is no usefulness in distinguishing them. In fact, two objects can have the same identity without having the same attributes or even, necessarily, being of the same class. When the bank customer is reconciling the transactions of the bank statement with the transactions of the check registry, the task is, specifically, to match transactions that have the same identity, even though they were recorded by different people on different dates (the bank clearing date being later than the date on the check). The purpose of the check number is to serve as a unique identifier for this purpose, whether the problem is being handled by a computer program or by hand. Deposits and cash withdrawals, which don't have an identifying number, can be trickier, but the same principle applies: each transaction is an ENTITY, which appears in at least two forms.

It is common for identity to be significant outside a particular software system, as is the case with the banking transactions and the apartment tenants. But sometimes the identity is important only in the context of the system, such as the identity of a computer process.

Therefore:

When an object is distinguished by its identity, rather than its attributes, make this primary to its definition in the model. Keep the class definition simple and focused on life cycle continuity and identity. Define a means of distinguishing each object regardless of its form or history. Be alert to requirements that call for matching objects by attributes. Define an operation that is guaranteed to produce a unique result for each object, possibly by attaching a symbol that is guaranteed unique. This means of identification may come from the outside, or it may be an arbitrary identifier created by and for the system, but it must correspond to the identity distinctions in the model. The model must define what it means to be the same thing.

Identity is not intrinsic to a thing in the world; it is a meaning superimposed because it is useful. In fact, the same real-world thing might or might not be represented as an ENTITY in a domain model.

An application for booking seats in a stadium might treat seats and attendees as ENTITIES. In the case of assigned seating, in which each ticket has a seat number on it, the seat is an ENTITY. Its identifier is the seat number, which is unique within the stadium. The seat may have many other attributes, such as its location, whether the view is obstructed, and the price, but only the seat number, or a unique row and position, is used to identify and distinguish seats.

On the other hand, if the event is "general admission," meaning that ticket holders sit wherever they find an empty seat, there is no need to distinguish individual seats. Only the total number of seats is important. Although the seat numbers are still engraved on the physical seats, there is no need for the software to track them. In fact, it would be erroneous for the model to associate specific seat numbers with tickets, because there is no such constraint at a general admission event. In such a case, seats are not ENTITIES, and no identifier is needed.

Modeling ENTITIES

It is natural to think about the attributes when modeling an object, and it is quite important to think about its behavior. But the most basic responsibility of ENTITIES is to establish continuity so that behavior can be clear and predictable. They do this best if they are kept spare. Rather than focusing on the attributes or even the behavior, strip the ENTITY object's definition down to the most intrinsic characteristics, particularly those that identify it or are commonly used to find or match it. Add only behavior that is essential to the concept and attributes that are required by that behavior. Beyond that, look to remove behavior and attributes into other objects associated with the core ENTITY. Some of these will be other ENTITIES. Some will be VALUE OBJECTS, which is the next pattern in this chapter. Beyond identity issues, ENTITIES tend to fulfill their responsibilities by coordinating the operations of objects they own.

The customerID is the one and only identifier of the Customer ENTITY in Figure, but the phone number and address would often be used to find or match a Customer. The name does not define a person's identity, but it is often used as part of the means of determining it. In this example, the phone and address attributes moved into Customer, but on a real project, that choice would depend on how the domain's customers are typically matched or distinguished. For example, if a Customer has many contact phone numbers for different purposes, then the phone number is not associated with identity and should stay with the Sales Contact.

Designing the Identity Operation

Each ENTITY must have an operational way of establishing its identity with another object—distinguishable even from another object with the same descriptive attributes. An identifying attribute must be guaranteed to be unique within the system however that system is defined—even if distributed, even when objects are archived.

As mentioned earlier, object-oriented languages have "identity" operations that determine if two references point to the same object by comparing the objects' locations in memory. This kind of identity tracking is too fragile for our purposes. In most technologies for persistent storage of objects, every time an object is retrieved from a database, a new instance is created, and so the initial identity is lost. Every time an object is transmitted across a network, a new instance is created on the destination, and once again the identity is lost. The problem can be even worse when multiple versions of the same object exist in the system, such as when updates propagate through a distributed database.

Even with frameworks that simplify these technical problems, the fundamental issue exists: How do you know that two objects represent the same conceptual ENTITY? The definition of identity emerges from the model. Defining identity demands understanding of the domain.

Sometimes certain data attributes, or combinations of attributes, can be guaranteed or simply constrained to be unique within the system. This approach provides a unique key for the ENTITY. Daily newspapers, for example, might be identified by the name of the newspaper, the city, and the date of publication. (But watch out for extra editions and name changes!)

When there is no true unique key made up of the attributes of an object, another common solution is to attach to each instance a symbol (such as a number or a string) that is unique within the class. Once this ID symbol is created and stored as an attribute of the ENTITY, it is designated immutable. It must never change, even if the development system is unable to directly enforce this rule. For example, the ID attribute is preserved as the object gets flattened into a database and reconstructed. Sometimes a technical framework helps with this process, but otherwise it just takes engineering discipline.

Often the ID is generated automatically by the system. The generation algorithm must guarantee uniqueness within the system, which can be a challenge with concurrent processing and in distributed systems. Generating such an ID may require techniques that are beyond the scope of this book. The goal here is to point out when the considerations arise, so that developers are aware they have a problem to solve and know how to narrow down their concerns to the critical areas. The key is to recognize that identity concerns hinge on specific aspects of the model. Often, the means of identification demand a careful study of the domain, as well.

When the ID is automatically generated, the user may never need to see it. The ID may be needed only internally, such as in a contact management application that lets the user find records by a person's name. The program needs to be able to distinguish two contacts with exactly the same name in a simple, unambiguous way. The unique, internal IDs let the system do just that. After retrieving the two distinct items, the system will show two separate contacts to the user, but the IDs may not be shown. The user will distinguish them on the basis of their company, their location, and so on.

Finally, there are cases in which a generated ID is of interest to the user. When I ship a package through a parcel delivery service, I'm given a tracking number, generated by the shipping company's software, which I can use to identify and follow up on my package. When I book airline tickets or reserve a hotel, I'm given confirmation numbers that are unique identifiers for the transaction.

In some cases, the uniqueness of the ID must apply beyond the computer system's boundaries. For example, if medical records are being exchanged between two hospitals that have separate computer systems, ideally each system will use the same patient ID, but this is difficult if they generate their own symbol. Such systems often use an identifier issued by some other institution, typically a government agency. In the United States, the Social Security number is often used by hospitals as an identifier for a person. Such methods are not foolproof. Not everyone has a Social Security number (children and nonresidents of the United States, especially), and many people object to its use, for privacy reasons.

In less formal situations (say, video rental), telephone numbers are used as identifiers. But a telephone can be shared. The number can change. An old number can even be reassigned to a different person.

For these reasons, specially assigned identifiers are often used (such as frequent flier numbers), and other attributes, such as phone numbers and Social Security numbers, are used to match and verify. In any case, when the application requires an external ID, the users of the system become responsible for supplying IDs that are unique, and the system must give them adequate tools to handle exceptions that arise.

Given all these technical problems, it is easy to lose sight of the underlying conceptual problem: What does it mean for two objects to be the same thing? It is easy enough to stamp each object with an ID, or to write an operation that compares two instances, but if these IDs or operations don't correspond to some meaningful distinction in the domain, they just confuse matters more. This is why identity-assigning operations often involve human input. Checkbook reconciliation software, for instance, may offer likely matches, but the user is expected to make the final determination.