How far to go with Domain Driven Design?
- by synti
I've read a little about domain driven design and the usage of a rich domain model, as described by Martin Fowler, and I've decided to put it in practice in a personal project, instead of using transaction scripts.
Everything went fine until UI implementation started. The thing is some views will use rich components that are backed up by unusual models and, thus, I must transform the domain model into what is used by those components. And that transformation is specially "complex" in the view-to-domain portion, up to the point that some business logic is involved.
Wich brings me to the questioning: where should I do these adaptations? So far I've got the following conclusions:
Doing it in the presentation layer is good because, well, if that layer imposes restrictions in it's model, then it should be the one to handle them. But it's bad because there'll be some business leakage.
If I do it on the services objects (controllers, actions, whatever), then it'd be good because there won't be any change to the domain API just because of presentation layer, but it's bad because then I'd have transaction scripts, wich is not the intended design.
Finally, if I do it on the domain model, there'd be no leakage of business logic at all. But in the future I could expect an explosion of the API into a series of methods designed just to handle that view-model <- domain-model adaptation.
I hope I could make myself clear on this.
