I’ve been working on a feature since January… I’ve been working on the entire UI and middleware of this feature.

We use SpringMVC for the HTTP endpoints on our web application and we dispatch all the requests via a Controller.

That’s easy right?

But… there is this anti-pattern used where we try to make our controllers lighter because Controllers should not handle business logic right?!

It is called: The Helper class.

That’s right, we have these Controllers that handle the request but instead of using the underlying business services, we add this ControllerHelper class that will handle all the logic and will only call services for almost all of these tasks:

• Save to the database
• Get something from the database

That’s right, we only do that and Ohhh I hate that so much.

Let’s see an example:

This is what the old code looked (I modified some stuff of course!), why would someone actually work on that code? and even worse… the unit tests for THAT controller were testing that you setted the correct info in the correct object…

Oh but here it came, someone had the idea to create this:

The Oh God Why Helper class, now our Controllers are clean of “logic” right?

The Fuck?

Yeah I know, so, if you read the code you noticed that there are some “userService” there… oh right, those services are defined right now like this:

The Fuck?!

Yup, those services logic is only to call another service or just the database.

My Solution…

Well, I think that the “Helper” classes should not exist.. it should not handle all that logic… so I rewrote the Controller and deleted some (because there are like… A LOT OF THOSE Controller/Helper classes) of the Helper class methods and got something like this:

So, all the logic is now at the bussiness layer and the controller only handles the bad request (if there is an error on the business layer it is handled there and return something that the controller can interpret)

Basic stuff but still mostly all of the team doesnt understand this, I just wanted to rant.