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Learning MVC - Part 1: Introduction to MVC Architecture and Separation of Concerns

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12 Jul 2013CPOL3 min read 378.3K   1K   300  
Introduction to MVC architecture and Separation of Concerns.
This is an old version of the currently published article.

Introduction 

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After having gone through numerous of blogs and articles, I came to a conclusion that very few of the genuine writers have explained the topic from the basic to full-fledged, while including a working application. My effort in this MVC articles series will be to cover almost all the aspects of MVC starting from creating a simple app and connecting with the database with various Microsoft providers. We’ll be gradually moving forward part by part so we can understand and practically implement every scenario.

Road Map

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  • Part1: Introduction to MVC architecture and Separation of Concerns.
  • Part 2: Creating MVC Application from scratch and connecting it with database using LINQ to SQL.
  • Part 3: Connecting the MVC Application with the help of EntityFramework DB-First approach.
  • Part 4: Connecting the MVC Application with the help of EntityFramework Code-First approach.
  • Part 5: Implementing Repository Pattern in MVC Application with EntityFramework.
  • Part 6: Implementing a generic Repository Pattern and Unit Of Work pattern in MVC Application with EntityFramework.

All set? Let's start our journey with Part1. 

Part1: Introduction to MVC architecture and Separation of Concerns

Topics to be Covered

  1. What does MVC mean.
  2. Understanding MVC Architecture.
  3. Separation of Concerns

Players

Model: The business entity on which the overall application operates. Many applications use a persistent storage mechanism (such as a database) to store data. MVC does not specifically mention the data access layer because it is understood to be encapsulated by the Model.

View: The user interface that renders the model into a form of interaction.

Controller: Handles a request from a view and updates the model that results a change in Model’s state.

To implement MVC in .NET we need mainly three classes (View, Controller and the Model).

MVC Architecture

           The choice of MVC comes when we go for a solution where the separation of concerns, ease of maintainability and extensibility of an application matters a lot. As per the architecture given below, we can see the request-response flow of a MVC application.

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The architecture is self explanatory. The browser (as usual) sends a request to IIS, IIS searches for the route defined in MVC application and passes the request to the controller as per route, the controller communicates with the model and passes the populated model (entity) to View (front end), Views are populated with model properties, and are rendered on the browser, passing the response to browser through IIS via controllers which invoked the particular View.

Separation of Concern

As per Wikipedia 'the process of breaking a computer program into distinct features that overlap in functionality as little as possible'. MVC design pattern aims to separate content from presentation and data-processing from content. Theoretically sound, but where do we see this in MVC? One place is reasonably clear - between the data-processing (Model) and the rest of the application.

When we talk about Views and Controllers, their ownership itself explains separation. The views are just the presentation form of an application, it does not have to know specifically about the requests coming from controller. The Model is independent of View and Controllers, it only holds business entities that can be passed to any View by the controller as required for exposing them to the end user. The controller is independent of Views and Models, its sole purpose is to handle requests and pass it on as per the routes defined and as per the need of rendering views. Thus our business entities (model), business logic (controllers) and presentation logic (views) lie in logical/physical layers independent of each other.

Conclusion

Now that we know why and where to use MVC, in the next part of the series we’ll be creating an MVC application from scratch, and exploring the practical implementation of MVC.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Architect https://codeteddy.com/
India India
Akhil Mittal is two times Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) firstly awarded in 2016 and continued in 2017 in Visual Studio and Technologies category, C# Corner MVP since 2013, Code Project MVP since 2014, a blogger, author and likes to write/read technical articles, blogs, and books. Akhil is a technical architect and loves to work on complex business problems and cutting-edge technologies. He has an experience of around 15 years in developing, designing, and architecting enterprises level applications primarily in Microsoft Technologies. He has diverse experience in working on cutting-edge technologies that include Microsoft Stack, AI, Machine Learning, and Cloud computing. Akhil is an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) in Web Applications and Dot Net Framework.
Visit Akhil Mittal’s personal blog CodeTeddy (CodeTeddy ) for some good and informative articles. Following are some tech certifications that Akhil cleared,
• AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design.
• AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies.
• AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals.
• Microsoft MCTS (70-528) Certified Programmer.
• Microsoft MCTS (70-536) Certified Programmer.
• Microsoft MCTS (70-515) Certified Programmer.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhilmittal/
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