IDs in the domain

Hello everyone,

I'm reading my way through Vaughn Vernon's "Implementing DDD" and I'm currently half-way through. I like the general approach, however, there's a thing that bothers me: the code is teeming with IDs. TenantId, userId, whateverId.

IDs such as these don't have a place in the ubiquitous language of a bounded context and I really don't want to deal with them in code implementing the domain logic.

In my view, using IDs there amounts to an ill-encapsulated, manually-managed de/serialization strategy. The IDs are only stand-ins for proper objects, so why not handle the conversion at the boundary and then work with domain objects throughout the domain code?

Put slightly differently, when I hold an entity, there's no need for a conceptually separate ID. An entity is identical only to itself and as such is its own identity. IDs only come into it if an entity needs a shortcut to represent it outside of its original context.

So, are there common opinions or even a consensus on IDs among DDD practitioners? Is the approach in IDDD representative?

Michael



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