Developing the Business Logic Layer

Overview

Previous chapters covered how to create a physical database provider for your module, and how all the methods contained in the provider directly correlate to stored procedures within the database. After the provider was completed, you created an abstraction class that abstracts the methods contained in the provider to be used by the Business Logic Layer (BLL).

In this chapter, you will transform the record set returned by the provider into a collection of objects that is provided by the Business Logic Layer within your module. This chapter continues with concepts that were introduced in Chapter 7 on the DotNetNuke (DNN) architecture, because module architecture mirrors the architecture provided by DNN.

The idea here is to totally separate the physical database from the module or application logic that you create. Separating the two enables plug-and-play extensibility when you want to change a database provider. Because the provider is abstracted from the actual business logic, you can use the same code, but different data stores, and because they're compiled separately, there is no need to recompile the application to change database providers.

You will now extend this provider architecture to the business logic of the application. Here you create a collection of objects with specific properties that will be exposed to your user layer, which is covered in Chapter 15.