ViewModels and rendering

Question

In several sample projects, I\'ve seen ViewModels being used to convert data objects into strings, for use in the View.

The ViewModel will typically have a construct

Answer 1

It converts everything to string because everything in web is a string.

Basically - view model is supposed to be in 'ready to output' state. If web were made from numbers only - we would transform everything to ints/decimals.

Whole point of viewModel - to format data representable. In your case - size enum to small/medium/large. It's not that detaching logic from views makes this valuable - it's ability to adept your data for web in one way, one place.

---

Answering to comment =>

Yeah, that sits well. I'm doing the same. But thing to mention - I'm not against putting that into views too. Because views and view models are last in 'dependency chain'. I'm quite pragmatic and completely against only to situations when developer uses domain model as view model and requirements for view model gets in conflict with domain model (i.e. when developer adds new "domain objects" for representational purposes only).