The archetypical example of a Value Object is Money. It's very conceivable that if you build an international e-commerce application, you will want to encapsulate the concept of 'money' into a class. This will allow you to perform operations on monetary values - not only basic addition, subtraction and so forth, but possibly also currency conversions between USD and, say, Euro.
Such a Money object has no inherent identity - it contains the values you put into it, and when you dispose of it, it's gone. Additionally, two Money objects containing 10 USD are considered identical even if they are separate object instances.
Other examples of Value Objects are measurements such as length, which might contain a value and a unit, such as 9.87 km or 3 feet. Again, besides simply containing the data, such a type will likely offer conversion methods to other measurements and so forth.
Services, on the other hand, are types that performs an important Domain operation, but doesn't really fit well into the other, more 'noun'-based concepts of the Domain. You should strive to have as few Services as possible, but sometimes, a Service is the best way of encapsulating an important Domain Concept.
You can read more about Value Objects, Services and much more in the excellent book Domain-Driven Design, which I can only recommend.
Services come in 3 flavours: Domain Services, Application Services, and Infrastructure Services.
- Domain Services : Encapsulates
business logic that doesn't naturally
fit within a domain object, and are NOT typical CRUD operations – those would belong to a Repository.
- Application Services : Used by
external consumers to talk to your
system (think Web Services). If consumers need access to CRUD operations, they would be exposed here.
- Infrastructure Services : Used to
abstract technical concerns (e.g.
MSMQ, email provider, etc).
Keeping Domain Services along with your Domain Objects is sensible – they are all focused on domain logic. And yes, you can inject Repositories into your Services.
Application Services will typically use both Domain Services and Repositories to deal with external requests.
Hope that helps!
Best Answer
Reduced to the essential distinction, identity matters for entities, but does not matter for value objects. For example, someone's Name is a value object. A Customer entity might be composed of a customer Name (value object), List<Order> OrderHistory (List of entities), and perhaps a default Address (typically a value object). The Customer Entity would have an ID, and each order would have an ID, but a Name should not; generally, within the object model anyway, the identity of an Address probably does not matter.
Value objects can typically be represented as immutable objects; changing one property of a value object essentially destroys the old object and creates a new one, because you're not as concerned with identity as with content. Properly, the Equals instance method on Name would return "true" as long as the object's properties are identical to the properties of another instance.
However, changing some attribute of an entity like Customer doesn't destroy the customer; a Customer entity is typically mutable. The identity remains the same (at least once the object has been persisted).
You probably create value objects without realizing it; anytime you are representing some aspect of an Entity by creating a fine-grained class, you've got a value object. For example, a class IPAddress, which has some constraints on valid values but is composed of simpler datatypes, would be a value object. An EmailAddress could be a string, or it could be a value object with its own set of behaviors.
It's quite possible that even items that have an identity in your database don't have an identity in your object model. But the simplest case is a composite of some attributes that make sense together. You probably don't want to have Customer.FirstName, Customer.LastName, Customer.MiddleInitial and Customer.Title when you can compose those together as Customer.Name; they'll probably be multiple fields in your database by the time you think about persistence, but your object model doesn't care.