Document/View Architecture Topics
The parts of the MFC framework most visible both to the user and to you, the programmer, are the document and view. Most of your work in developing an application with the framework goes into writing your document and view classes. This article family describes:
The purposes of documents and views and how they interact in the framework.
What you must do to implement them.
The class provides the basic functionality for programmer-defined document classes. A document represents the unit of data that the user typically opens with the Open command on the File menu and saves with the Save command on the File menu.
The class provides the basic functionality for programmer-defined view classes. A view is attached to a document and acts as an intermediary between the document and the user: the view renders an image of the document on the screen and interprets user input as operations upon the document. The view also renders the image for both printing and print preview.
The following figure shows the relationship between a document and its view.
Document and View
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The document/view implementation in the class library separates the data itself from its display and from user operations on the data. All changes to the data are managed through the document class. The view calls this interface to access and update the data.
Documents, their associated views, and the frame windows that frame the views are created by a document template. The document template is responsible for creating and managing all documents of one document type.