EcoRail

The whole idea of having a controller and a view is so that the view renders only exactly what it is given, and the controller is able to give it whatever data it likes from wherever it needs to obtain it.

After working with ECO and Monorail for a while it has been a real pleasure, but I am starting to think that maybe exposing ECO objects directly to the view is not the right approach.

If for example I put an Employee into the PropertyBag the view can easily display $Employee.Salary. This might not be a problem when you develop both the controllers and the view but in my case someone else will ultimately create the views. Do I really want them to be able to have access to this information? In addition, what if the view engine they use has a scripting language that is able to set values? Setting $Employee will merely set the PropertyBag[“Employee”] value, but setting $Employee.Salary could see a certain view developer buying a new car next month.

I am very tempted to change the site whilst it is in its early stages of development. It does seem more logical to have small chunks of data or small classes to pass back and forth between the controller and the view. This is more in line with the design I have in my PocketPC application.

If that is the case it will probably mean that EcoRails is redundant! Actually, only the EcoDataBind part would really be redundant I think, the rest would still be quite useful!

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