Dynamic Permissions for roles in ASP.NET MVC

I haven't worked much with MVC, however I have worked a lot with MVVM and here's my take on it:

Question, Answer, and User are all data objects. Its OK for them to know of each other, but they should not be aware of anything outside of the data object layer, such as Views, Controllers, ViewModels, etc.

In an ideal world, your View only references the Models. They might know of the Controller, but they shouldn't have to reference it directly. The ViewModel only knows of other Models. The Controller knows about Models and ViewModels. It doesn't care about the View at all, even though it supplies the View with ViewModels or Models.

So your objects end up looking like this:

• M odels come in two varieties: Models and ViewModels.

  • Models are simple data objects that simply exist to hold data, and are generally a reflection of database data. They do not access the database or contain any sort of business logic that is unrelated to them.
  • ViewModels are data objects that contain data that the View needs, not necessarily what the database needs. They can contain Models, although Models should not contain ViewModels.

• C ontrollers contain your business logic. They control the data access calls, creating Models/ViewModels to pass to the View, advanced business logic such as permissions, etc. They basically control the entire code layer.

• V iews are just used to give the users a user-friendly interface. They accept either a ViewModel or Model, and display it in some way that looks nice to the user.

Yes it is possible to create reusable widgets that play nicely with ASP.NET MVC. As an example, Telerik has two control suites that are "targeted" at the ASP.NET MVC developer. The first is the Telerik Extensions for MVC. These are implemented as HTML Helpers that spit out the appropriate markup (html and jQuery). The second is the Kendo framework which is a pure jQuery based framework that happens to work well with MVC (but also plays nicely with other web frameworks out there).

Both of these are pretty good examples of how to create re-usable widgets that can be dropped in with a few lines of code. The beauty of these frameworks lie in their exstensibility both in terms of functionality as well as look and feel.