ASP.NET MVC - Model in Web project

Question

I'm new to ASP.NET MVC and inherited a project that uses the technology.

Such Web project contains three folders: Views, Controllers and Model. As I understand it, the Model contains in fact your domain / business logic and is called by your controllers. The controllers themselves act as delegators between Views and Model.

Now, in a typical layered architecture, there should be no references in any project to the Web/UI project.

I find this quite confusing:
-> The UI contains the Model, which is - in an ideal world - based on "Domain Driven Design"-principles.
-> The layers on top of the UI (Services and DataAccess) cannot have a reference to the UI

How can you write efficient services and dataaccess layers if they do not know your model?

What am I missing here? Is the Web.Model different from "DDD" and should I still have a separate BL project? If that is the case, then what is the Web.Model supposed to contain?

Answer 1

I view the Model as a concept. You can have a completely separate project containing your Domain (your entities, your services etc.) and reference that in your "UI" project. In this scenario this will be your "Model". This is what I typically do, In my Models folder I keep "ViewModels", which I use for Binding/Validation (for the UI). For example, If I have an Employee but I don't necessary want to use all its properties (or for that matter different properties), I will create an EmployeeViewModel adjust it the way I want, I'll add validation (if required) and I'll pass it to my View.

This is by no means, "the right way"/"only way", but It worked for me in the past, and I thought I'll share (also, I'm pretty terrible in explanations, so I really hope this post makes sense, in case it doesn't or clarifications are needed - please let me know).