Establish a workflow and inter-component communication in Clean Architecture

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I am building an application consisting of 3 components, each comprising a GUI part (views, controllers, presenters) and a domain part (use cases and entities). There is one common infrastructure component (database). With this I am trying to adhere to the clean architecture principles: dependencies towards the domain layer, and using dependency inversion to enable a flow of control indicated with the green arrow

There is a specific order in which the components are used (workflow). When a certain state is reached in a component (can be user initiated or after some work has been finished in the domain layer), the next component needs to be initialized and the GUI needs to move to the next view/page. Furthermore, each workflow step produces an output which serves as input for the next step, thereby setting the state of the next component (black dashed arrows from left to right). This data (ID: string, Matrix3D: 4x4 matrix) needs to be communicated across components.

Architecture

  • What (and why) is a good solution (i.e., in which layer) to implement workflow logic, i.e., (de)activating components and initiating the transition to a new “view/page”?

    • E.g. I could add yet another domain component superordinate to all other domain components which deactivates the current component, initializes the next component, and initiates a transition in the view component.

    • E.g. I could add yet another GUI component superordinate to all other GUI components initiates transition in the views. Once the view is initialized, it could initiate the initialization of the corresponding domain component.

  • What (and why) is a good solution to communicate data across components?

    • E.g., I could communicate the data via the infrastructure layer.
    • E.g., I could pass all data that needs to be exchanged between components to the GUI layer (eventhough not all of this data is required in the GUI) and manage data exchange there.
    • E.g., I could directly communicate in the domain layer (e.g., using a messaging system).
clean-architecture workflow components architecture
1 Answers

It sounds like you would need an overarching GUI component that represents the actual workflow and uses instances of those other components. Most UI frameworks would help you with such composition. Since you didn't tell us which framework you are using you'd have to figure that out using the frameworks docs.

Generally make sure you create a loose coupling between parent and children to ensure the subordinate components can be reused independently.

Also another thing you didn't ask for - In your diagram all components use the same DB block in the bottom. Its not clear what that means exactly, but make sure that each component has their own independent persistence, for example separate tables. Any need to communicate state from one component to the next should go through an API of the component owning the data and not through directly shared DB tables.

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