But then the 'Student' object does not represent a student but represent the result of a search which may or may not be a student, and this result decides its own view. Effectively the model is coupled to a specific view, which seems wrong to me. I would much prefer to have the search return an Option<Student> and then have the controller select the view based on this option. This also makes it explicit that the search may nor return a result, which is not really explicit if it always returns a Student instance.