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by irjustin 660 days ago
Yeah definitely understand the frustration. I've been there and while I don't think we've found _the_ solution, we've settled into a flow that we're generally happy with.

For us we separate validations in two. Business and Data validations, which are generally defined as:

- Business: The Invoice in Country X is needs to ensure Y and Z taxes are applied at Billing T+3 days otherwise throw an error.

- Data Validation: The company's currency must match the country it operates in.

Business validations and logic always go inside services where as data validations are on the model. Data validations apply to 100% of all inserts. Once there's an IF statement segmenting a group it becomes business validation.

I could see an argument as to why the above is bad because sometimes it's a qualitative decision. Once in a while the lines get blurry, a data validation becomes _slightly_ too complex and an arguement ensues as to whether it's data vs business logic.

Our team really adheres to services and not fat models, sorry DHH.

To me, it's all so controversial whatever you pick will work out just fine - just stick to it and don't get lazy about it.

1 comments

Services are definitely better and a solid part of a domain-driven design. The trouble is with Django I think it's a bandaid on a fundamentally broken architecture. The models end up anaemic because they're trying to be two things at once. It's super common to see things like services directly mutating model attributes and set up relationships manually by creating foreign keys etc. All of that should be hidden far away from services.

The ultimate I think is Domain-Driven Design (or Clean Architecture). This gives you a true core domain model that isn't constrained by frameworks etc. It's as powerful as it can be in whatever language you use (which in the case of Python is very powerful indeed). Some people have tried to get it to work with Django but it fights against you. It's probably more up front work as you won't get things like Django admin, but unless you really, truly are doing CRUD, then admin shouldn't be considered a good thing (it's like doing updates directly on the database, undermining any semblance of business rules).