Did you know? – NuGetGallery RequestModels

A while back, while working on ASP.NET MVC, I learned to not pass the business models directly into my Views. Especially if they were Entity Framework entities. So I got in the habit of creating specialized ViewModels for this purpose.

But last week, while reading NuGetGallery’s source, I saw how they took this concept to the next step: RequestModels. You see, for the MVC applications that I wrote I was accustomed to re-using the ViewModel to capture data from the requests, my thinking was “well, I used the ViewModel to generate the response, it’s fitting that it should also be used to receive requests from the page that it created”.


I like the idea of further separating the concerns between the object that is used to create response and the one used to bind to the request. You’ll notice how the RequestModels have the validations from DataAnnotations that are to be used when binding to the request and only have the fields necessary to process each request.

For some reason, the application doesn’t use this extra separation all the time and some times receives the ViewModel (for example in the PackagesController.cs). An oversight?

I am going to play around with this way of organization in my own projects and see how it feels.