Q:

Active Record must have domain logic?

I started some time working with the Yii Framework and I saw some things "do not let me sleep." Here I talk about my doubts about how Yii users use the Active Record.
I saw many people add business rules of the application directly in Active Record, the same generated by Gii. I deeply believe that this is a misinterpretation of what is Active Record and a violation of SRP.

Early on, SRP is easier to apply. ActiveRecord classes handle persistence, associations and not much else. But bit-by-bit, they grow. Objects that are inherently responsible for persistence become the de facto owner of all business logic as well. And a year or two later you have a User class with over 500 lines of code, and hundreds of methods in it’s public interface. Callback hell ensues.

When I talked about it with some people and my view was criticized. But when asked:
And when you need to regenerate your Active Record full of business rules through Gii what do you do? Rewrite? Copy and Paste? That's great, congratulations!
Got an answer, only the silence.
So, I:
What I am currently doing in order to reach a little better architecture is to generate the Active Records in a folder /ar. And inside the /models folder add the Domain Model.
By the way, is the Domain Model who owns the business rules, and is the Domain Model that uses the Active Records to persist and retrieve data, and this is the Data Model.
What do you think of this approach?
If I'm wrong somewhere, please tell me why before criticizing harshly.

A:

Some of the comments on this article are quite helpful:
http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2012/10/17/7-ways-to-decompose-fat-activerecord-models/
In particular, the idea that your models should grow out of a strictly 'fat model' setup as you need more seems quite wise. 
Are you having issues now or mainly trying to plan ahead? This may be hard to plan ahead for and may just need refactoring as you go ...
Edit:
Regarding moveUserToGroup (in your comment below), I could see how having that might bother you.  Found this as I was thinking about your question: https://gist.github.com/justinko/2838490 An equivalent setup that you might use for your moveUserToGroup would be a CFormModel subclass.  It'll give you the ability to do validations, etc, but could then be more specific to what you're trying to handle (and use multiple AR objects to achieve your objectives instead of just one).
I often use CFormModel to handle forms that have multiple AR objects or forms where I want to do other things.
Sounds like that may be what you're after.  More details available here:
http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/form.overview

