Building an Agnostic ERP System: Day 1 – Core Architecture

Building an Agnostic ERP System: Day 1 – Core Architecture

by | May 5, 2025 | Boring systems, ERP

After returning home from an extended journey through the United States, Greece, and Turkey, I found myself contemplating a common challenge over my morning coffee. There are numerous recurring problems in system design and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) implementation that developers face repeatedly.

To address these challenges, I’ve decided to tackle a system that most professionals are familiar with—an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system—and develop a design that achieves three critical goals:

  1. Performance Speed: The system must be fast and responsive
  2. Technology Agnosticism: The architecture should be platform-independent
  3. Consistent Performance: The system should maintain its performance over time

Design Decisions

To achieve these goals, I’m implementing the following key design decisions:

  • Utilizing the SOLID design principles to ensure maintainability and extensibility
  • Building with C# and net9 to leverage its modern language features
  • Creating an agnostic architecture that can be reimplemented in various technologies like DevExpress XAF or Entity Framework

Day 1: Foundational Structure

In this first article, I’ll propose an initial folder structure that may evolve as the system develops. I’ll also describe a set of base classes and interfaces that will form the foundation of our system.

You can find all the source code for this solution in the designated repository.

The Core Layer

Today we’re starting with the core layer—a set of interfaces that most entities will implement. The system design follows SOLID principles to ensure it can be easily reimplemented using different technologies.

Base Interfaces

Here’s the foundation of our interface hierarchy:

  • IEntity: Core entity interface defining the Id property
  • IAuditable: Interface for entities with audit information
  • IArchivable: Interface for entities supporting soft delete
  • IVersionable: Interface for entities with effective dating
  • ITimeTrackable: Interface for entities requiring time tracking

Service Interfaces

To complement our entity interfaces, we’re also defining service interfaces:

  • IAuditService: Interface for audit-related operations
  • IArchiveService: Interface for archiving operations

 

Repo

egarim/SivarErp: Open Source ERP

Next Steps

In upcoming articles, I’ll expand on this foundation by implementing concrete classes, developing the domain layer, and demonstrating how this architecture can be applied to specific ERP modules.

The goal is to create a reference architecture that addresses the recurring challenges in system design while remaining adaptable to different technological implementations.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll dive deeper into the implementation details of our core interfaces.

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