Today we'll take a look at the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern or architecture, exploring its characteristics, benefits, and of course, drawbacks.
Table of Contents
1 - What is MVC?
MVC is a design pattern or architecture whose main goal is to divide an application into three components: the Model, the View, and the Controller. The idea behind the MVC pattern is to separate the application into sections with a clear purpose, avoiding mixing responsibilities.
NOTE: This is one of the few acronyms that is the same in both English and Spanish.
2 - How does the MVC pattern work?
For me, it's always easier to understand with a use case, and the most common one is on web pages. For example, this blog:
When you load the page, you are making a call to a Controller (the C), which contains the information of the route you are accessing. It acts only as an intermediary between the model and the view.
The controller takes the information and gives it to the model, which is responsible for the logic of the data. Yes, it is the model that handles accessing the database, inserting data, deleting data, etc. as well as performing validations.
And this is a key point because in many applications, business logic is placed in the controller, which is not entirely correct. Honestly, you should never put business logic in the controller, but that's another discussion.
Once the model has finished working with the data, it returns that information to the controller.
Then the controller sends or, rather, uses the view to present the information to the user.
What's happening under the hood is that the view is a template where we render the HTML based on the data the model has provided via the controller.
What becomes clear from this diagram is that all the interactions between the model and the view happen through the controller, keeping data manipulation and presentation completely separated. This should, in theory, make it easier to develop applications.
3 - Benefits and drawbacks of the MVC pattern
For me, one of the main benefits of MVC is that it has been used for 40 or 50 years or more. That means not only are there many applications that use it, but it's generally something studied in colleges and universities.
This pattern also introduces us to the idea of separation by layers. Although these layers are somewhat limited, getting used to that separation is very helpful for your professional career.
This limitation of layers becomes especially noticeable if you have a large app that has grown from simple to more complex logic — you'll realize it becomes harder to maintain. Perhaps by further splitting the model into several layers, you can obtain a more maintainable app.
As I said, that's more for large applications. For proof-of-concept projects or small apps, MVC is perfect.
4 - MVC in C#
When it comes to C#, the model-view-controller architecture is very popular. In fact, when you install Visual Studio with the installer, if you've selected the ASP.NET and web development workflows, you get some sample projects, and one of them is MVC.
I didn't have it installed, so I'm installing it now...
But anyway, you should know that you can do it without the workflows; you just need to know how. With the workflows or templates, they come ready for you.
Once it's installed, when you create a project in Visual Studio, Rider, or via the command line, you'll have the MVC template available:
And that's it, here you have the code with the structure, and you just hit play to run the code:
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