Aggregates

Learn what aggregates are and about their importance in the DDD world.

It might be necessary to create a huge number of entities and value objects and facilitate interactions between them, when we deal with a complex bounded context. These conditions may lead to the creation of a big ball of mud. As was explained before, this is an anti-pattern where interactions among objects are unmanageable. It can be described as a spaghetti code.

A big ball of mud implementation tends to grow out of control and is difficult to maintain over time. DDD understands this problem and solves it through the definition of a tactical pattern called aggregate.

What is an aggregate?

An aggregate object is a ...