[LRUG] Encapsulation/Responsibility delegation and API versioning.

[Graham Ashton]

On 22 Aug 2011, at 16:16, Ian Leitch wrote:

> The smell that's now beginning to emerge is that controllers are
> getting fat with protected helper methods that build data structures
> for conversion into JSON.

Converting data to JSON sounds like presentation layer to me; you could think of it an as an alternative view.

> What solutions have other people used for this problem?

It reminds me a lot of how the presenter pattern often gets used in Rails, with presenter classes getting stored in app/presenters.

> I'm almost considering a layer in between my controllers and models,
> almost like a presentation layer from model to controller.

From what you've described, it sounds to me as though the layer you're missing wouldn't sit between those two, but would replace the view.

> Mixins could help here... perhaps something like this?

Rather than mix some rendering API into a model, I'd make rendering objects and initialise them by passing a model in. Let them get any data they need from the model and encapsulate the logic about how to create JSON in the renderer.