DDD Making changes across contexts

Question

Suppose I am writing software for an insurance company. I use DDD and have a bounded context with entities related to the customer account, address, and related information. If a customer logs in and makes changes to these entities it is straightforward.

But as it is, there is another portal, which the internal support staff uses. Now if a customer calls in to update their account information (not a policy but phone number, address etc.). What is the best and clean way to do it?

1. Make a call to bounded context used by the customers (HTTP etc).
2. Allow making changes from the internal portal (probably modifying data across the database/schema boundaries).
3. Raise a domain event about changed object, and handle it on the customer side application (again this is an event related to a domain object in another context and we are not writing to database from the internal portal).

Answer 1

You already answered your questions if your business allows user to directly change info about customers directly by phone call this is the case your system should allow to do it. This is what about DDD to focus on the domain and domain is business logic from your example I see the context customers management and some other contexts that use this info but if some one requires to change info about customers this is the business case and system should allow to do it!

Answer 2

Bounded Contexts exist because they have a meaning in the domain and a reason to exist in your system. They don't exist to serve a specific type of user or a specific client application. In fact, it's most common that a Bounded Context serves multiple types of users and multiple client applications, especially in software systems with a customer-facing application and a back-office.

In your Insurance domain, both the customer and back-office users will directly interact with the CustomerManagement BC as this BC is there to serve both, not only the Customer. The same way that both the customers and back-office users will be able to see the customer's policies, their coverage, etc.

Technically, the implementation will depend on your architecture. Both client applications could talk to the same API and even share endpoints. Or you could provide an API per client, and these APIs would directly talk to the same BC (either calling the same code or by making remote calls to the same remote service).