Business logic in MVC
I have 2 questions:
Q1. Where exactly does "business logic" lie in the MVC pattern? I am confused between Model and Controller.
Q2. Is "business logic" the same as "business rules"? If not, what is the difference?
It would be great if you could explain with a small example.
Answer
Fist of all:
I believe that you are mixing up the MVC pattern and n-tier-based design principles.
Using an MVC approach does not mean that you shouldn't layer your application.
It might help if you see MVC more like an extension of the presentation layer.
If you put non-presentation code inside the MVC pattern you might very soon end up in a complicated design.
Therefore I would suggest that you put your business logic into a separate business layer.
Just have a look at this: Wikipedia article about multitier architecture
It says:
Today, MVC and similar model-view-presenter (MVP) are Separation of Concerns design patterns that apply exclusively to the presentation layer of a larger system.
Anyway ... when talking about an enterprise web application the calls from the UI to the business logic layer should be placed inside the (presentation) controller.
That is because the controller actually handles the calls to a specific resource, queries the data by making calls to the business logic and links the data (model) to the appropriate view.
Mud told you that the business rules go into the model.
That is also true, but he mixed up the (presentation) model (the 'M' in MVC) and the data layer model of a tier-based application design.
So it is valid to place your database related business rules in the model (data layer) of your application.
But you should not place them in the model of your MVC-structured presentation layer as this only applies to a specific UI.
This technique is independent of whether you use a domain driven design or a transaction script based approach.
Let me visualize that for you:
Presentation layer: Model - View - Controller
Business layer: Domain logic - Application logic
Data layer: Data repositories - Data access layer
The model that you see above means that you have an application that uses MVC, DDD and a database-independed data layer.
This is a common approach to design a larger enterprise web application.
But you can also shrink it down to use a simple non-DDD business layer (a business layer without domain logic) and a simple data layer that writes directly to a specific database.
You could even drop the whole data-layer and access the database directly from the business layer, though I do not recommend it.
Thats' the trick...I hope this helps...
[Note:] You should also be aware of the fact that nowadays there is more than just one "model" in an application. Commonly, each layer of an application has it's own model. The model of the presentation layer is view specific but often independent of the used controls. The business layer can also have a model, called the "domain-model". This is typically the case when you decide to take a domain-driven approach. This "domain-model" contains of data as well as business logic (the main logic of your program) and is usually independent of the presentation layer. The presentation layer usually calls the business layer on a certain "event" (button pressed etc.) to read data from or write data to the data layer. The data layer might also have it's own model, which is typically database related. It often contains a set of entity classes as well as data-access-objects (DAOs).
The question is: how does this fit into the MVC concept?
Answer -> It doesn't!
Well - it kinda does, but not completely.
This is because MVC is an approach that was developed in the late 1970's for the Smalltalk-80 programming language. At that time GUIs and personal computers were quite uncommon and the world wide web was not even invented!
Most of today's programming languages and IDEs were developed in the 1990s.
At that time computers and user interfaces were completely different from those in the 1970s.
You should keep that in mind when you talk about MVC.
Martin Fowler has written a very good article about MVC, MVP and today's GUIs.