ASP.NET MVC Middle tier object naming

Question

As a corporate developer who works alone I find myself creating and writing a lot of websites that consist of screens that are basically wrappers for a DB table. So for instance on a screen that updates companies I would have a controller like this:

 public class CompaniesController
{
    private readonly ICompaniesManager manager;

    public CompaniesController(ICompaniesManager manager)
    {
        this.manager = manager;
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public JsonResult Update(Company company)
    {
            // validation goes here
            this.manager.Update(company);
            // handle update result
    }
}

this controller is talking to a middle tier "Manager" class.

 public class CompaniesManager : ICompaniesManager
{
    private readonly ICompaniesRepository repository;

    public CompaniesManager(ICompaniesRepository repository) 
    {
        this.repository = repository;
    }

    public void Update(Company company)
    {   
        // business logic & caching code    
        this.repository.Update(company);
    }
}

As you can see this is talking to a repository class that actually handles updating the database.

So I always seem to end up with the pattern xxxController -> xxxManager -> xxxRepository (where xxx is the object/table). I keep finding myself wondering if I am missing something fundamental about how a 3 tier app should work or how middle tier classes should be named.

Would this be considered a correct 3-tier architecture or am I missing something?

Answer 1

What you have there seems like a standard architectural solution for MVC applications. Since MVC does not provide a solution for the data layer you have a repository. So the 3-layers are:

• Business layer: where your classes appended by "Manager" are
• Data layer: repository
• Presentation layer: View and Controller

EDIT:

You should change the word "Manager" to "Service" since what you have there is called a service layer. We usually append the word "Manager" (or "Helper", or "Util") to static classes - something which may be a code smell.