A typical architecture of a .NET web application is to use EF Code First for data access and MVC to render the web pages. The data model in the database is usually (and should be!) normalized. A normalized data model is also great for updates, but when displaying data it is not enough. E.g. in a table of cars I don’t want to display a numeric, database internal id of the car’s brand. I want to display the name of the brand. Creating a separate read model simplifies that.
Separating the read and write models are a key concept of the recently popular CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Separation) architecture. I won’t go as far as the CQRS model does, but rather show a simple way to dress the write model’s car entity with the values required for displaying.
My key objective is to get a model where I can get everything needed for rendering a view to the user in one fetch from the database, with a minimum of extra coding and mapping code.
