domain driven design - DDD, value objects and ORM

Question

Value objects do not have identity. ORM needs identity to update the database.

How to trick ORM?

(Marking Id for value object as internal won't work because ORM lives in a different assembly and moving it to the same assembly is not acceptable).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

When Eric Evans talks about "entities have identity, Value Objects do not", he's not talking about an ID column in the database - he's talking about identity as a concept.

VOs have no conceptual identity. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have persistence identity. Don't let persistence implementation cloud your understanding of Entities vs VOs.

See my post here.