[design-patterns] 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.

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.

The term business logic is in my opinion not a precise definition. Evans talks in his book, Domain Driven Design, about two types of business logic:

• Domain logic.
• Application logic.

This separation is in my opinion a lot clearer. And with the realization that there are different types of business rules also comes the realization that they don't all necessarily go the same place.

Domain logic is logic that corresponds to the actual domain. So if you are creating an accounting application, then domain rules would be rules regarding accounts, postings, taxation, etc. In an agile software planning tool, the rules would be stuff like calculating release dates based on velocity and story points in the backlog, etc.

For both these types of application, CSV import/export could be relevant, but the rules of CSV import/export has nothing to do with the actual domain. This kind of logic is application logic.

Domain logic most certainly goes into the model layer. The model would also correspond to the domain layer in DDD.

Application logic however does not necessarily have to be placed in the model layer. That could be placed in the controllers directly, or you could create a separate application layer hosting those rules. What is most logical in this case would depend on the actual application.

As a couple of answers have pointed out, I believe there is some some misunderstanding of multi tier vs MVC architecture.

Multi tier architecture involves breaking your application into tiers/layers (e.g. presentation, business logic, data access)

MVC is an architectural style for the presentation layer of an application. For non trivial applications, business logic/business rules/data access should not be placed directly into Models, Views, or Controllers. To do so would be placing business logic in your presentation layer and thus reducing reuse and maintainability of your code.

The model is a very reasonable choice choice to place business logic, but a better/more maintainable approach is to separate your presentation layer from your business logic layer and create a business logic layer and simply call the business logic layer from your models when needed. The business logic layer will in turn call into the data access layer.

I would like to point out that it is not uncommon to find code that mixes business logic and data access in one of the MVC components, especially if the application was not architected using multiple tiers. However, in most enterprise applications, you will commonly find multi tier architectures with an MVC architecture in place within the presentation layer.

It does not make sense to put your business layer in the Model for an MVC project.

Say that your boss decides to change the presentation layer to something else, you would be screwed! The business layer should be a separate assembly. A Model contains the data that comes from the business layer that passes to the view to display. Then on post for example, the model binds to a Person class that resides in the business layer and calls PersonBusiness.SavePerson(p); where p is the Person class. Here's what I do (BusinessError class is missing but would go in the BusinessLayer too):

Model = code for CRUD database operations.

Controller = responds to user actions, and passes the user requests for data retrieval or delete/update to the model, subject to the business rules specific to an organization. These business rules could be implemented in helper classes, or if they are not too complex, just directly in the controller actions. The controller finally asks the view to update itself so as to give feedback to the user in the form of a new display, or a message like 'updated, thanks', etc.,

View = UI that is generated based on a query on the model.

There are no hard and fast rules regarding where business rules should go. In some designs they go into model, whereas in others they are included with the controller. But I think it is better to keep them with the controller. Let the model worry only about database connectivity.

Q1:

Business logics can be considered in two categories:

1. Domain logics like controls on an email address (uniqueness, constraints, etc.), obtaining the price of a product for invoice, or, calculating the shoppingCart's total price based of its product objects.

2. More broad and complicated workflows which are called business processes, like controlling the registration process for the student (which usually includes several steps and needs different checks and has more complicated constraints).

The first category goes into model and the second one belongs to controller. This is because the cases in the second category are broad application logics and putting them in the model may mix the model's abstraction (for example, it is not clear if we need to put those decisions in one model class or another, since they are related to both!).

See this answer for a specific distinction between model and controller, this link for very exact definitions and also this link for a nice Android example.

The point is that the notes mentioned by "Mud" and "Frank" above both can be true as well as "Pete"'s (business logic can be put in model, or controller, according to the type of business logic).

Finally, note that MVC differs from context to context. For example, in Android applications, some alternative definitions are suggested that differs from web-based ones (see this post for example).

Q2:

Business logic is more general and (as "decyclone" mentioned above) we have the following relation between them:

business rules ? business logics

This is an answered question, but I'll give my "one cent":

Business rules belong in the model. The "model" always consists of (logically or physically separated):

• presentation model - a set of classes that is well suited for use in the view (it's tailored toward specific UI/presentation),
• domain model - the UI-independent portion of the model, and
• repository - the storage-aware portion of the "model".

Business rules live in the domain model, are exposed in a presentation-suitable form to the "presentation" model and are sometimes duplicated (or also enforced) in the "data layer".

A1: Business Logic goes to Model part in MVC. Role of Model is to contain data and business logic. Controller on the other hand is responsible to receive user input and decide what to do.

A2: A Business Rule is part of Business Logic. They have a has a relationship. Business Logic has Business Rules.

Take a look at Wikipedia entry for MVC. Go to Overview where it mentions the flow of MVC pattern.

Also look at Wikipedia entry for Business Logic. It is mentioned that Business Logic is comprised of Business Rules and Workflow.

Why don't you introduce a service layer. then your controller will be lean and more readable, then your all controller functions will be pure actions. you can decompose business logic as you much as you need within service layer . code reusability is hight . no impact on models and repositories.