Item Presentation Models for WPF

After two weeks of work (and some play), I've finally posted my Item Presentation Models for WPF article to Code Project. This is my first Code Project article ever, so I'm excited about it. I hope readers find it useful and I look forward to their feedback.

Naming domain-specific ItemPresentationModel objects

I've decided to follow a rather unconventional naming pattern for domain-specific presentation-model classes — suffix them with "View". I am aware that this naming breaks away from the conventional terminology of MVC and its derivatives, in which "View" refers to the UI layer. So I devote this blog entry to digressing my reasons.

Outside the scope of MVC-related design patterns, the word "view" has a more general meaning that's applied in varying contexts. SQL, for example, uses it to mean a derived view of base data. Closer to the present topic, WPF includes the CollectionView class which is a sort of presentation-model. People who prefer that "view" strictly refer to the UI probably hate this choice of class name. However, appending "ViewModel" or the even longer "PresentationModel" to all my class names is verbose in my opinion.

For the above reasons I instead use the suffix "View" as an acceptably short alternative for my domain-specific Presentation Model classes. By doing so, I intend to invoke the word's general meaning of the sense that the presentation-model provides a derived view of the domain object. Another interpretation is that the presentation-model provides an interface for the domain object that makes it fit for presentation; the presentation-model is therefore an abstract view (presentation) object. This latter interpretation is useful since it emphasises the presentation-model's actual purpose, which is that it facilitates visual display (in that sense, Josh Smith's original "Presenter" suffix doesn't sound half bad).

I am aware that this naming breaks away from every quasi-standard in the literature of MVC and its derivatives. Even the WPF library doesn't use it consistently. That is, they use the word "View" in its more traditional MVC sense as well, as in ListView and TreeView. If instead WPF named those controls "ListControl" and "TreeControl" — which would be consistent with many other controls in their library such as ContentControl, ItemsControl, UserControl, and TabControl — then I would find their choice of "CollectionView" more acceptable. In any case, I still find their suffix "View" to be so much more aesthetically pleasing than the alternatives, so that's what I choose to use in my own projects. Such a choice, however, has implications only within the scope of individual projects or organisations. Therefore, others can use whatever naming convention they find to be the easiest to live with.