RedisEvents.EventSourcing 0.2.20

RedisEvents.EventSourcing

A light event-sourced aggregate root (command side) on top of RedisEvents. It rides the same partitioned topics, positions and error contract core already provides — this package adds only what an event store needs beyond that: an aggregate's own stream as its source of truth, optimistic concurrency, and reflection-free dispatch.

The read side lives in the sibling RedisEvents.Projections package — AddEventProjector, IProjection<TEvent>, IViewStore<TView>. This package depends on it (for EventTypeRegistry, shared so an aggregate's stream and its projections never disagree on wire format), but that dependency runs one way: RedisEvents.Projections has no idea an aggregate exists, and a service that only wants typed projections over an ordinary topic can reference just that package.

This is a library, not a service. It has no ASP.NET Core dependency and starts nothing on its own beyond what AddEventStore wires into your host.

A full worked example — events, an aggregate, a projection, wired end to end — lives in samples/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.Sample.Inventory; the snippets below are lifted directly from it. Two minimal, separately-runnable ASP.NET Core services built on top of it — a command-side API (.CommandApi) and a read-side API (.ViewApi) — show the same example as two real, independently deployable microservices; both are exercised together, over real HTTP and a real Redis, by tst/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.Sample.Tests.

Quickstart

1. Events — plain records, with source-generated JSON for AOT:

public sealed record ItemCreated(string Id, string Name);
public sealed record ItemRenamed(string NewName);
public sealed record ItemsCheckedIn(int Count);
public sealed record ItemsRemoved(int Count);
public sealed record ItemDeactivated;

[JsonSerializable(typeof(ItemCreated))]
[JsonSerializable(typeof(ItemRenamed))]
[JsonSerializable(typeof(ItemsCheckedIn))]
[JsonSerializable(typeof(ItemsRemoved))]
[JsonSerializable(typeof(ItemDeactivated))]
internal partial class InventoryJsonContext : JsonSerializerContext;

internal static class InventoryEventTypes
{
    public static void Register(EventTypeRegistry events) => events
        .RegisterJson("inventory.created", InventoryJsonContext.Default.ItemCreated)
        .RegisterJson("inventory.renamed", InventoryJsonContext.Default.ItemRenamed)
        .RegisterJson("inventory.checked-in", InventoryJsonContext.Default.ItemsCheckedIn)
        .RegisterJson("inventory.removed", InventoryJsonContext.Default.ItemsRemoved)
        .RegisterJson("inventory.deactivated", InventoryJsonContext.Default.ItemDeactivated);
}

The wire type string ("inventory.created") is chosen once, by you, and never derived from the class name — see Serialisation for why that matters.

2. The aggregate — command side, no infrastructure in sight:

public sealed class InventoryItem : AggregateRoot
{
    string id = "";
    string name = "";
    bool active;
    int currentCount;

    public InventoryItem()
    {
        On<ItemCreated>(e => { id = e.Id; name = e.Name; active = true; });
        On<ItemRenamed>(e => name = e.NewName);
        On<ItemsCheckedIn>(e => currentCount += e.Count);
        On<ItemsRemoved>(e => currentCount -= e.Count);
        On<ItemDeactivated>(e => active = false);
    }

    public override string AggregateName => "Inventory";
    public override string Id => id;

    public static InventoryItem Create(string id, string name)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(name))
            throw new ArgumentException("name is not valid", nameof(name));

        var item = new InventoryItem();
        item.Raise(new ItemCreated(id, name));
        return item;
    }

    public void Rename(string newName) => Raise(new ItemRenamed(newName));

    public void Deactivate()
    {
        if (!active) throw new InvalidOperationException("already deactivated");
        Raise(new ItemDeactivated());
    }

    // CheckIn / Remove: raise ItemsCheckedIn / ItemsRemoved after their own validation.
}

On<TEvent> replaces dynamic-based Apply dispatch: it is registered once, in the constructor, so every event type the aggregate can ever see is known statically — no reflection, and raising or replaying an event nobody registered a handler for throws immediately instead of silently doing nothing.

3. Wiring, command side — three lines:

builder.AddEventStore("inventory", InventoryEventTypes.Register);

// later, injected as IEventRepository
var item = await repository.LoadAsync<InventoryItem>(id)
    ?? throw new KeyNotFoundException(id);

item.Rename("New name");
await repository.SaveAsync(item);   // expectedVersion defaults to item.Version

LoadAsync returns null — not an exception — when the id has no history; "does this aggregate exist" is an ordinary question, not an error path.

4. The read side — a projection reading the same topic AddEventStore publishes to, using the sibling RedisEvents.Projections package:

builder.AddEventProjector("inventory", InventoryEventTypes.Register)
       .AddRedisViewStore<InventoryDetail>("inventory", "detail", InventoryJsonContext.Default.InventoryDetail)
       .AddProjection<InventoryDetailProjection>();

AddEventProjector's events argument can be omitted here — step 3's AddEventStore call already registered InventoryEventTypes.Register for this topic, and the two share one EventTypeRegistry. See that package's own Quickstart for InventoryDetailProjection's definition and everything else about the read side: registering a projection without a class, projecting from more than one stream, view stores, and the error contract.

That's the whole quickstart: events + a JSON context, one aggregate class, and three lines of builder.Add... wiring — plus whatever the read side needs from the sibling package. No IServiceCollection ceremony either side.

How events are stored

SaveAsync appends every uncommitted event to the aggregate's own stream and publishes each to the topic (partitioned by the aggregate's id, so its events land on one partition and stay ordered for the projector) in a single MULTI/EXEC:

WATCH {topic}:state:es:Inventory:42        (the version check)
MULTI
  XADD {topic}:state:es:Inventory:42 * b .. t ..         ← the aggregate's own history, no MAXLEN, ever
  XADD s:{topic}:<p> MAXLEN ~ n * b .. t .. k .. h ..     ← the topic, trimmed like any publish
EXEC

Version is the aggregate stream's length. It is the only definition a single Redis round trip can enforce as a concurrency check, and it needs no second key to stay in sync. The corollary is an invariant this package relies on and nothing in it ever violates: an aggregate's own stream is never trimmed. If something outside this package ever did, every later concurrency check would silently compare against the wrong number.

The aggregate's own stream holds only what loading reads. Its entries are the event body and type — no partition key (the stream name already is the aggregate), and no correlation id, traceparent or headers. Because that stream is never trimmed, anything else would be paid for on every event forever; for small events the metadata easily outweighs the body. The topic copy keeps all of it, since that is what projections read. Set Streams:Topics:<t>:StateMetadata: true to keep correlation id, trace and headers on the aggregate's stream too — for example to keep a permanent record of which request wrote each event. It is safe to change at any time: one stream can hold entries of both shapes.

Both writes are one transaction: a version-check failure applies neither, and a connection lost around EXEC leaves an outcome that is unknown but never torn — the aggregate's history and the topic can never disagree about what happened. The repository stamps no headers of its own — only the caller's correlation id and headers are written — so an event saved without any carries no header field at all. No projection needs a per-event version or id header: EventMeta.Id already lets a projection tell a redelivery from new information, on this topic or any other, whether or not its producer is this package's own event store. See View stores.

Optimistic concurrency

The check matters whenever an event is emitted from a read-decide-write step over aggregate state (two concurrent commands can both read the same stale state and both be allowed to commit, silently violating an invariant), and is safe to skip for streams that only append independent facts with no such decision behind them (telemetry, logs, per-key single-writer streams) — see SaveWithoutConcurrencyCheckAsync below.

try
{
    await repository.SaveAsync(item);
}
catch (ConcurrencyException)
{
    item = await repository.LoadAsync<InventoryItem>(id) ?? throw new KeyNotFoundException(id);
    item.Rename("New name");   // re-decide against the current state
    await repository.SaveAsync(item);
}

ConcurrencyException is a plain Exception, not a RedisEvents.Errors.DontIgnoreException. Retrying an identical save can never succeed after a lost race — only a reload and a fresh decision fixes it — so deriving from DontIgnoreException would turn a caller-resolvable condition into a partition blocked forever. A command handler that genuinely must not give up wraps this in its own policy:

sealed class InventoryCommandStuckException(string message, Exception inner) : DontIgnoreException(message, inner);

for (var attempt = 0; ; attempt++)
{
    try { await repository.SaveAsync(item); break; }
    catch (ConcurrencyException ex) when (attempt < 3) { item = await Reload(); }
    catch (ConcurrencyException ex) { throw new InventoryCommandStuckException("gave up after 3 retries", ex); }
}

Serialisation and the event-type registry

RegisterJson covers the default, AOT-safe path via a source-generated JsonTypeInfo<T>. The wire type string is chosen once and never derived from .FullName or .Name — a class rename is then a pure refactor, because it is the string, not the CLR name, that a stream of history already written is keyed on. Register (a raw serialise/deserialise pair, for MessagePack or anything else that isn't JSON) and everything else about EventTypeRegistry is documented in the sibling package's Serialisation section — EventTypeRegistry itself lives there, shared by both packages for a topic that uses both.

View stores and the projector's error handling are also the sibling package's concern — see its View stores and Error handling sections.

Limits

• No snapshots. LoadAsync replays an aggregate's full history every time. Add snapshotting only once a real aggregate's replay time says so — most never will.
• No view-store abstraction beyond IViewStore<TView>. View storage, indexing and querying stay the service's concern; this package supplies a minimal default and a seam, not a framework.
• Never trim an aggregate's own stream. Its length is its version — see How events are stored.
• A topic needs CoLocatePartitions: true (the default) to host an event store: AddEventStore fails fast at startup otherwise, because there is no non-transactional fallback to offer.

Benchmarks

This package is measured at three levels, each isolating a different thing: an in-process [MemoryDiagnoser] micro-benchmark for SaveAsync/EventProjector.HandleAsync's own per-call cost with no Redis anywhere; a real-Redis, no-HTTP benchmark for RedisEventRepository throughput and the save-to-projected-view latency a single process sees; and the real Inventory sample — two independently hosted ASP.NET Core services, .CommandApi and .ViewApi — talking only over real HTTP and a real Redis topic between them. The first two show what the library costs in isolation; the third is the number that actually matters for a CQRS split like this one, because it's the only one that includes the HTTP hops and two separate processes a real deployment would have. None of these tests assert on absolute numbers — a CI box's throughput is not a contract; they exist so a change that regresses this package's hot path shows up before a reviewer has to notice it by eye.

The numbers below are from this repo's own suites, run on the same single dev machine as the root README's Performance numbers (13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700KF, WSL2, one un-tuned redis:8-alpine container via Testcontainers) — a directional baseline, not an SLA. Run-to-run variance on shared/virtualized hardware is normal; re-run the suites on your own target infrastructure for numbers you'd actually size capacity against.

Table 1 — micro-benchmark (EventSourcingMicroBenchmarks.cs, BenchmarkDotNet, no Redis):

dotnet test tst/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.UnitTests --filter "TestType=PerfTest"

Table 2 — library throughput (EventSourcingPerfBenchmarkTests.cs, real Redis, no HTTP):

dotnet test tst/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.Tests --filter "TestType=PerfTest"

Table 3 — real service, over HTTP (InventoryServicePerfTests.cs; both microservices hosted for real, real Redis, no in-process shortcuts):

dotnet test tst/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.Sample.Tests --filter "TestType=PerfTest"

A note on what "throughput" means above. Every number in Table 3 so far — and the ~1,486 saves/s and ~2,349 loads/s in Table 2 — comes from a single HttpClient/connection firing requests one at a time in a sequential loop. That is concurrency 1: it is really a latency measurement (round trips per second = 1 / round-trip time), not the service's throughput ceiling under load. Table 4 below repeats the write and read measurements with 10 concurrent clients, which is what actually exercises request pipelining, connection-pool parallelism and Redis's own ability to serve overlapping commands.

Table 4 — real service, 10 concurrent clients (InventoryServicePerfTests.cs, same real services and real Redis as Table 3):

dotnet test tst/RedisEvents.EventSourcing.Sample.Tests --filter "FullyQualifiedName~concurrent_clients"

POST /items/no-check is a benchmark-only twin of POST /items added specifically for this comparison: same load → decide → save shape, but through the new IEventRepository.SaveWithoutConcurrencyCheckAsync / IStreamStore.AppendAndPublishAsync(name, partitionKey, events, ct) overload, which appends and publishes in one MULTI/EXEC exactly like the checked path but with no WATCH and no version comparison — it always applies, and never throws ConcurrencyException. The ~5.5x gap between the two under 10 concurrent clients is the cost of the per-save optimistic-concurrency check once requests are actually overlapping: at concurrency 1 there is nothing to contend with WATCH against, so the two paths cost about the same; under real concurrency, every checked write against the same Redis connection pool competes with the others' WATCH/MULTI/EXEC round trips, where the unconditioned path only issues a plain transaction. This API is additive and opt-in — SaveAsync's behavior and guarantees are unchanged. See Optimistic concurrency above for when it's appropriate to reach for it.

The takeaway is where the cost actually sits. Save_one_event's own per-call overhead is under a microsecond and allocation-light (Table 1), so the ~1,486 saves/s ceiling in Table 2 is almost entirely the real Redis round trip, not this package's own bookkeeping — the same shape core's own Performance numbers show for XADD. The write path barely changes shape once it's behind real HTTP either (~765 req/s in Table 3 vs. ~1,486 saves/s in Table 2 is the ASP.NET Core request pipeline and JSON binding on top of the same underlying save, not a new bottleneck). The read path is faster over HTTP than the write path, because GET /items/{id} is one Redis hash read behind a thin endpoint, with no aggregate replay and no XADD involved. The one number that genuinely changes character is create-to-view latency: a p50 in the low single-digit milliseconds with an occasional double-digit-millisecond tail (both in Table 2's in-process form and Table 3's real-HTTP form) — that tail is the real EventProjector consumer's own read-loop scheduling (it polls and batches rather than pushing synchronously the instant SaveAsync returns), not the write or the extra HTTP hop; a caller that polls a view expecting it to reflect a write it just made should expect that shape, not a flat constant.