Session State with MVP and Application Controller patterns
- by Graham Bunce
Hi,
I've created an MVP (passive view) framework for development and decided to go for an Application Controller pattern to manage the navigation between views. This is targeted at WinForms, ASP.NET and WPF interfaces.
Although I'm not 100% convinced that these view technologies really swappable, that's my aim at the moment so my MVP framework is quite lightweight.
What I'm struggling to fit in is the concept of a "Business Conversation" that needs state information to be either (a) maintained for the lifetime of the View or, more likely, (b) maintained across several views for the lifetime of a use case (business conversation). I want state management to be part of the framework as I don't want developers to worry about it. All they need to do is to "start" a conversation, "Register" objects and the framework does the rest until the "end" a conversation.
Has anybody got any thoughts (patterns) to how to fit this into MVP? I was thinking it may be part of the Application Controller responsibility (delegating to a Conversation Manager object) as it knows about current state in order to send the user to the next view.... but then I thought it may be up to the Presenter to start and end the conversation so then it comes down the presenters to manage conversations and the objects registered for the that conversation. Unfortunately that means presenters can't be used in different conversations... so that idea doesn't seem right.
As you can see, I don't think there is an easy answer (and I've looked for a while). So anybody else got any thoughts?
