An Approach to the Metadata Driven Programming in .Net Framework

Abstract

We describe a metadata driven approach to development of stereotyped business accounting software. We modify the model-view-controller pattern by placing all the application's logic into a model, and automatically building controllers and views. The work has two essential parts. The first one is developing a way to define metadata, that can be altered in runtime, can depend on context and can store actions as well as data. The second is designing of the software as a data server, which stores a model and its metadata, and modify it by requests from various clients, e.g. web pages or windows applications. This approach was implemented in the Thornado framework and was used for creation of various applications. We justify the easiness and elegance of our implementation of the metadata driven development, and discuss advantages of the approach, such as cross-platformness, scalability and testability.