ABP without ORM

Question

I recently stumbled upon ABP (previously Asp.Net BoilerPlate) as a framework to rebuild a web-app in a modular way. It's very interesting indeed, and come with a very wild bunch of basic elements like authentication, logging, security, multi-tenancy, settings and so on...

But, as far as I have understood it by now, ABP is "strongly coupled" with EF Core or Dapper, and I don't like to use ORM in my code, I have a more "database driven" approach and like to write queries myself.

So, the main question is: it's possible to use ABP WITHOUT using EFCore/Dapper? Or it's better to switch to other modular framework like OrchardCore or ExtCore?

EDIT: 11/11/2020 after @hikalkan reply.

Hi @hikalkan, thanks for your kind reply. Maybe I have to explain more what I want to achieve, so you can advise me better. My goal is to create a "pluggable" web-app, in which I can replace a module with another with same functionality but different details.

A little introduction: I have a "complex" web-app for HR departments of small-to-medium companies, many customers use it, and each one have its own copy installed in its premises. The app is composed by many functionality: personal data, contracts data, trainings data, shifts and so on. But each customer have slightly different modules, while the app itself is an old, monolithic one: it works, but I have to maintain different versions, almost one for each customer, very difficult and time consuming. Don't blame it on me, I have "inherited" the app and have to maintain and improve it that way.

But, finally, I can spend some time rebuild it from scratch, and I want it to be "modular", so that the main part (authentication, profiling, db interaction, theming, security, logging, etc...) stay stable & solid, shared among all installations, and each customer have a selection of module/plug-in to choose from. A bit like Wordpress, but better.

For example, let's say I have a simple module "contactSimple" for managing contacts (emails, phone numbers, pagers, and so on), each contact have a type and a value field in the database, very basic, and 90% of my customers are happy with it. But the remaining 10% want to add a note field, a flag "is main contact" or other minor changes. Now, what i want to do is: develop the "contactEnhanced" module as a separetad class library, with same interface and main functions of "contactSimple", compile it as a dll, simply change the dll in the web-app, update the database if needed to, reload the app and the new dll takes place, without altering any other component.

I was thinking to simply use dynamic reflection to obtain it, but then i found that reflection is not very suited, 'cause is slow and heavy on resources, so while surfing the web I find ABP.

Now, THE question: in your opinion, is ABP the framework/solution I was searching for? Please let me know!

Answer 1

ABP is designed to be database provider independent. It currently has two DB provider integration options: EF Core & MongoDB. That means ABP is not strongly coupled with the EF Core or Dapper: It works with MongoDB too. You set -d mongodb if you've created your solution with the ABP CLI.

So, the Framework itself has no relation to any database provider. But the pre-built modules have. For example, ABP provides an Identity module that has user and role management functions and needs to a database and includes some code to interact with the database. So it can't be db provider independent. All the pre-built modules provides EF Core & MongoDB integration packages.

If you want to use these modules (when you create a new application from the startup templates, some modules come pre-installed), you have to decide to use EF Core or MongoDB for the database operations of these modules.

When it comes to you own application code: You are free to use any approach, including ADO.NET with manual SQL queries. Just do it how you do in a regular application. If you want to isolate database queries, create your own repository classes. In this way, you don't see ORM in your code. But the modules still use EF Core or MongoDB.

Actually there a possibility to completely drop the EF Core references: Implement all the repositories needed by the pre-built modules yourself. Then they will work since they only depend on repository interfaces.

BTW; If you use OrchardCore, it uses YesSQL (Yes, YES SQL) as a core dependency and you can not change it because all the OrchardCore framework depends on it everywhere. Also, OrchardCore is UI dependent: It uses aspnet core MVC / Razor Pages UI while the ABP Framework is UI independent and provides 3 built-in options: Angular, MVC and Blazor.

Edit: After edit of the question

The story you've explained is one of the goals of the ABP Framework. ABP is highly modular and also extensible. We built all the modules to be extensible. For example, the module entity extension system allows you to add new properties to existing entities of a module (the module is used as a NuGet package) without touching its source code. You can override the server side logic of the module.

But modularity is hard in general. I mean the module also should be designed so extensible/replaceable. If you want to declare some interfaces for a module, so the module can be completely replaceable, you have a lot of restrictions. For example, you can not write SQL join queries to tables of that module (because the replacement module can use a different table structure).

However, if the customizations will be lighter, you can follow the ABP Framework's module design to make your module extensible/customizable. See https://docs.abp.io/en/abp/latest/Customizing-Application-Modules-Guide and https://docs.abp.io/en/commercial/latest/guides/customizing-modules (commercial docs will be moved to the open source side since they are available as open source now). BTW, ABP supports to load modules as dlls from a folder. It reads dlls and initializes modules on application initialization.

I can only explains what ABP offers. I can't make suggestion, unfortunately. Because a real life project is complex and I can't predict all the problems & requirements you will have in the future :)