Pattern: Server-side page fragment composition
patternContext
You have applied the Microservice architecture pattern. Services are developed by business capability/subdomain-oriented teams that are also responsible for the user experience. Some UI screens/pages display data from multiple service. Consider, for example, an Amazon-style product detail page, which displays numerous data items including:
- Basic information about the book such as title, author, price, etc.
- Your purchase history for the book
- Availability
- Buying options
- Other items that are frequently bought with this book
- Other items bought by customers who bought this book
- Customer reviews
- Sellers ranking
- …
Each data item corresponds to a separate service and how it is displayed is, therefore, the responsibility of a different team.
Problem
How to implement a UI screen or page that displays data from multiple services?
Forces
Solution
Each team developers a web application that generates the HTML fragment that implements the region of the page for their service. A UI team is responsible for developing the page templates that build pages by performing server-side aggregation (e.g. server-side include style mechanism) of the service-specific HTML fragments.
Related patterns
- The Client-side UI composition pattern is an alternative approach