What methods should go in my DDD factory class?

Question

I am struggling to understand what my factory class should do in my DDD project. Yes a factory should be used for creating objects, but what exactly should it be doing. Consid

Answer 1

I personally would use the factory in couple of circumstances:

1) Something elsewhere governs what type of objects this factory returns (ie. it can return objects depending on circumstances. For example return a stub object when I am testing, return an actual implementation when I am not (this is obviously more of Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection issue - but if you do not want to add containers to your project just yet)).

2) I have quite complex objects that have containers, dependencies, other relation etc. and they need to be built carefully to avoid creating null or meaningless references. For example if I have a Schedule object I may need some start, end date fields set - if the logic for retrieving, figuring out these date is complex enough I may not want the calling class to know about it and just call the default factory method that created the schedule object.

Hope this helps.