How many tiers should my models have in a DB driven web app?
- by Hanno Fietz
In my experience, the "Model" in MVC is often not really a single layer. I would regularly have "backend" models and "frontend" models, where the backend ones would have properties that I want to hide from the UI code, and the frontend ones have derived or composite properties which are more meaningful in the context of the UI.
Recently, I have started to introduce a third layer in between when database normalization created tables that did not really match the conceptual domain objects anymore. In those projects I have model classes that are equivalent with the DB structure, these become components of objects that represent the domain model, and finally these are filtered and amended for displaying information to the user.
Are there patterns or guidelines for how, when and why to organize the data model across application layers?
