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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T01:49:24+00:00

This question really has larger architectural implications and I welcome any input or suggestions

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This question really has larger architectural implications and I welcome any input or suggestions on this:

I’m more of the Martin Fowler school of thought when it comes to OOP. I believe you should be able to directly render domain entities in the UI. If I have a Car entity, I should be able to render it to a webpage. The domain model is a crosscutting concern and not a layer. Treating the domain model as a layer leads to an anemic domain model. I don’t believe in DTOs in an OOP architecture.

A view model for me is a way of composing the domain entities required in your view. It’s not a DTO. I don’t understand what the reasoning behind using a view model like DTO is though it seems like a common thing to do using automapper?

So using the metadata approach I put data annotations on my domain model to give any UI implementation hints on how to render and validate the entities. I like to have a richER domain model.

In MVC3 how can you accomplish this (specifically using the Display data annotation) with a resource file that resides in the UI layer? Is there a native implementation for this or do I need to get creative myself? Or have I gone wrong somewhere in my approach?

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  1. Editorial Team

    So I ended up putting a resourse file in the domain model and added a custom HiddenFieldAttribute so that I don’t have to reference the MVC assembly in the domain model.

    I still fundamentally dissagree that a view model is really a DTO and that the domain model should be constructed as a layer. I feel that architecting the application in this way creates abstractions that really have no value. If the domain model was truly a layer then we would build a set of logical interfaces from which to access it, and this we don’t do. It’s a cross cutting concern.

    Thanks to olivehour for an interesting discussion and suggesting that it’s okay to place resource file(s) in to domain model assembly.

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