The relationship between the Repository and Unit of Work patterns is foundational in managing data access and ensuring transactional integrity in software applications, particularly when using frameworks like .NET Core.
Repository Pattern
The Repository pattern is an abstraction layer used to manage data access. It centralizes the data logic and operations, making the system easier to manage and decouple from the rest of the application. Repositories are responsible for encapsulating the logic required to access data sources, which includes basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations and potentially more complex business-specific queries. This pattern allows the application to interact with the data source (like a database) through high-level interfaces, which simplifies the underlying data access technology and promotes code reusability and testing[1][2][4].
Unit of Work Pattern
The Unit of Work pattern is a complementary pattern that handles transaction management and ensures that multiple changes to the database are treated as a single atomic operation. This means that all operations either succeed together or fail together, which is crucial for maintaining data integrity. The Unit of Work tracks the changes made during a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems[1][2][4].
Relationship Between Repository and Unit of Work
The relationship between these two patterns is closely intertwined. While the Repository pattern provides a simplified and consistent interface for accessing data within the application, the Unit of Work pattern ensures that changes made to the data through the repositories are either committed or rolled back together. This is particularly important in scenarios where the state of the database needs to be consistent and reflect a "unit" of work as a whole transaction.
In practical terms, the Unit of Work pattern often holds reference...
