• josh
• Jul 17,2008
• In: Code, Design

Viewing Context

When I was working on my most recent social networking project, we introduced an interest construct that we began referring to as the “Viewing Context”. Before explaining what this was used for, I’ll further explain the construct. The following diagram illustrates the scenario:

Figure 1.1

The construct simply embodies the notion of having a particular Business Object in the viewing context of the current page. For example, given some Url ‘ViewUser.aspx?UserId=1′ we would consider a UserViewContext to be available to the page. The following diagram illustrates the identification of viewing contexts:

Figure 1.2

This was particularly useful as we began to leverage the power of Role-based security. We identified roles that were associated with each ViewingContext, illustrated by the following diagram:

Figure 1.3

Consider the following sample population:

This could now be enforced with the following method:

Figure 1.4

There’s certainly more advantages to this than simplifying business rule enforcement but I thought I would focus on that for the introduction of the construct.

What are your thoughts? Is this an idea that can be reused or is it one of those one-time implementations?