Is it a bad idea to do ASP.NET MVC without any ORM ?

Question

Hi, I am learning ASP.NET MVC now a days and I have found that most of the examples in ASP.NET MVC are with ORM. I don't have any issue in using ORM for my learning and personal project. But at my work we have worked only with ASP.NET web forms and we use stored procedures only. We have data access layer (simple c# classes) as interface between asp.net code behind page and stored procedures. Now if we want to use ASP.NET MVC, will it be a bad idea to do it without an ORM. As most of the MVC frameworks like rails/django have built-in ORMs, is it any harm to use our own data access layer with ASP.NET MVC. I don't want to have any database related activity like datareader, datatable in my controllers. Is there any other better solution?

Answer 1

If you have a DAL already built - use it! Unless you were planning on moving from your existing DAL to an OR/M anyhow you won't find it beneficial to move to an OR/M for it's own sake.

One of the beautiful things about the MVC pattern is the is encourages a separation of concerns. This means that you are reducing coupling in you application which makes your application's architecture flexible and modular. This means that if at some point you want to swap out your existing DAL for a more modern OR/M solution you can do so with minimum impact to your application.

Answer 2

No harm at all. ASP.NET MVC doesn't require ORMs but you should have models (that might not map to your stored procedures 1:1) of the data your views and controllers can deal with.

You can roll your own ORM if you like even. ORMs are around to make things quicker for development so that you can easily map your database data to object models that you use in your application. You can map ORMs to stored procedures as well.

I personally perfer to use stored procedures and map the results to object through my own data access layer as it gives me a lot of flexibility. This is a personal preference though and there is no right / wrong answer.

Answer 3

Model View Controller is a framework to help provider a clear separation of concerns between the tiers of an application. The Model can be any form you wish really. ORM is not always appropriate, if you have some other DAL in mind then use it. Direct data access with the repository pattern works well, this will help you hide the logic you do use to access your database and allow you to change it later down the track with much more ease.