Ruby on Rails Best practices – Big Controller vs Small Controller

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This is more of a long-form comment, since it explains the origin of your dilemma, but provides no solutions.

The problem actually is caused by misinterpretation of MVC, which RoR popularizes.

It is the combination of two factors, which are causing this implosion of controller:

  • On the one side you have anemic model, because, instead of real model layer, RoR uses collection of ORM instances. The reason for it is that Rails was originally created to be a framework for fast prototyping (generation of throw-away code). And prototyping is exactly what active record is best at. Using scaffolding, you can easily generate active record structures from existing databases.

    But this cause some of the domain business logic to leak in your controllers.

  • On the other side you have the non-existent view. Since the goal was prototyping, Rails favored getting rid of views, which can actually contain presentation logic, by merging them into the controllers. The, now missing, views were replace with simple templates, which are just called “views”.

    This forces controllers to contain presentation logic.

These two factors would be the reason, why I am tempted to assert, that RoR is not even MVC framework. The resulting pattern is actually closer to Model-View-Presenter. Though it has been simplified to the point at which it starts to break Separation of Concerns.

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