Separating Out the Domain Model

Given the limitations of Smart UI architecture, there’s a widely accepted improvement that yields huge benefits for an application’s stability and maintainability.

By identifying the real-world entities, operations, and rules that exist in the industry or subject matter you’re targeting (the domain), and by creating a representation of that domain in software (usually an object-oriented representation backed by some kind of persistent storage system, such as a relational database or a document database), you’re creating a domain model.

What are the benefits of doing this?

• (Easy To Maintain) First, it’s a natural place to put business rules and other domain logic, so that no matter what particular UI code performs an operation on the domain (e.g., “open

a new bank account”), the same business processes occur.

• (No Source Code Duplications) Second, it gives you an obvious way to store and retrieve the state of your application’s universe at the current point in time, without duplicating that

persistence code everywhere.

• Third, you can design and structure the domain model’s classes and

inheritance graph according to the same terminology and language used by

experts in your domain, permitting a ubiquitous language shared by your programmers and business experts, improving communication and increasing the chance that you deliver what the customer actually wants (e.g., programmers working on an accounting package may never actually understand what an accrual is unless their code uses the same terminology).

In a .NET application, it makes sense to keep a domain model in a separate assembly (i.e., a C# class library project—or several of them) so that you’re constantly reminded of the distinction between domain model and application UI. You would have a reference from the UI project to the domain model project, but no reference in the opposite direction, because the domain model shouldn’t know or care about the implementation of any UI that relies on it.

For example, if you send a badly formed record to the domain model, it should return a data structure of validation errors, but would not attempt to display those errors on the screen in any way (that’s the UI’s job).