Question

I am working on a web application that has to present charts on different pages. Each page corresponds to a Controller, and each Controller that needs a chart has an interface to a ChartService. The service requests a chart from a third party vendor. It then returns an image wrapped up in some HTML with JavaScript as a string directly into the output stream. The ChartService needs to be supplied with data and some other parameters like time period and template file.

Should I have the charting functionality abstracted into its own Controller? Each different type of chart could be served by a different Action Method on the ChartController.

But would it be a problem then that I’m serving some of my pages from multiple Controllers? What are the guidelines to determine when functionality should be given its own controller?

Answer 1

Sounds like you needn’t change anything at all. You’ve abstracted away the third-party service inside of a wrapper so that your controllers don’t depend directly on that specific service. Creating a new controller in this case would amount to creating a wrapper around your wrapper.

Create a new controller when you want to add behavior to the application.