The Repository Design Pattern

The Repository Design Pattern, defined by Eric Evens in his Domain Driven Design book, is one of the most useful and most widely applicable design patterns ever invented. Any application has to work with persistence and with some kind of list of items. These can be users, products, networks, disks, or whatever your application is about. If you have a blog for example, you have to deal with lists of blog posts and lists of comments. The problem that all of these list management logics have in common is how to connect business logic, factories and persistence.

As we mentioned in the introductory paragraph, a Repository will connect Factories with Gateways (persistence). These are also design patterns and if you are not familiar with them, this paragraph will shed some light on the subject.

A factory is a simple design pattern that defines a convenient way to create objects. It is a class or set of classes responsible for creating the objects our business logic needs. A factory traditionally has a method called "make()" and it will know how to take all the information needed to build an object and do the object building itself and return a ready-to-use object to the business logic.