MVC Refactor, Take 2

[ahundiak]

@TomB

There’s another big problem with Web MVC as well: It ignores the fact there is such a thing as application state. It understands domain state but makes no attempt to account for the state of the application. As such, the application state is stored in the controller action in a very transient way.

Application state is things like:

What is the ID of the record being viewed/edited
Was the form submitted or not?
Is the submitted data valid?
Which page of results are we on?
What is the filter for the current set of results? e.g. search term, search order, category filter

The problem with storing this in temporary variables in the controller is that the controller has to give this information to anything that needs it and there’s no way of supplying the application state from anywhere else. Using a proper MVC approach where the state is in the model, the model can read the state from anywhere.

All of this information(except for “is valid”) is stored in the request object. Why would anyone think it’s stored in the controller?