Skip to main content

How to NOT expose a read only collection in C#

These days I had the opportunity to make a review over an ecommerce application. They tried to use CQRS and they almost succeeded. 
I notified a problem on their queries classes that can become a big problem in time, if you want to sell this solution as a platform. Also, from some perspective, these problems also violate the CQRS principle.
Let’s see some code now:
public class Order
{
    Collection<OrderItem> _items;   

    public IEnumerable<OrderItem> Items
    {
        get
        {
            return _items;
        }
    }
    ...
}
What do you see here strange?  We want to expose the OrderItem collection as a read only collection. To do this, we convert it to IEnumerable.
Hmmm… sounds good? Nope. Big mistake! Nobody stop us to convert the Items back to an ICollection and Add/Remove items from it.
Order order = new Order();
…
var orderItems = (Collection<OrderItem>)oder.Items;
What should we do? .NET framework has specials collections that can be used in these situations. I this case we should use IReadOnlyCollection<T>. This class will let the user to access items but he will not be able to modify the list (add or remove items from the collection).
To obtain the list as a read only collection we will need to use the AsReadOnly() method:
public class Order
{
    Collection<OrderItem> _items;   

    public IReadOnlyCollection<OrderItem> Items
    {
        get
        {
            return _items. AsReadOnly();
        }
    }
   
    ...
}
Under the hood, this method will create a new collection that point to our original items.
When expose items as “read-only”, you should always double check. There are many methods that permit us to cast items.

Comments

  1. What about the OrderItems themselves? You can't add or remove, but you can change the existing ones. How do you protect against that? Setting quantity to zero on an OrderItem (OrderLine) it's as if you deleted that item/line from the cart. Even today, to remove an item from your cart on Amazon you have to type zero in the quantity field and click "Update" :).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Encapsulating the internal collection with a ReadOnlyCollection clearly makes the intent more clear, but does not stops a programmer that is determined to break the encapsulation, by doing something like:

    IList orderItems = ((ReadOnlyCollection)(oder.Items)).Items;
    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I thought that modifying the IEnumerable collection while iterating will cause runtime exception, isn't that right?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...