Can DDD repositories be aware of user context?

Question

Say you were to develop a system which availability of entities and domain logic is highly dependent on user context. Would it make sense to handle the user context sensitiv

Answer 1

I sense a design smell here :-). Things by the time they reach domain layer should pretty much be translated into domain entities/attributes and should not have dependency on context. What I mean is the context should be used to change/represent the new state of entity. Here it more seems like that context is going to be used to determine how the entity is going to be persisted. Have I understood this correctly?

Having said that, if your dependency on context is more from an infrastructure perspective rather than business functionality perspective then having context sensitive Repositories is the right model you have come up with.

Towards that, could you consider passing usercontext through thread local like Spring does with Hibernate Session? This way your Repository class's constructors or methods would be less polluted. It, however, does reduce the readablility of your code a bit.

Hope that helps.