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spring-bootentitydto

Why do we have to convert entity to dto?

I'm trying to understand Spring Boot and building Rest APIs.

I've seen some projects which is creates their own Converter class or which is using modelMapper. But I couldn't clearly get the main idea.

Why do we have to convert entities to DTOs? I could'nt find a lot of docs about it. Can you help me?

I've found two different things for mapping.

mapstruct and modelmapper. Which one should i use?

Solution

  • DTO Represents Data Transfer Objects, They can be useful in many situation.

    1. Since the entity represents the database and has all fields created directly eg. a product entity has following schema

      name: "String", desc: "string", quantity_number: integer, quantity_qom: "string", amount_price: 200 amount_measure: "USD"

    DTO helps us show response or request in a structured manner like

    { product:{
  item:{
  name:"string",
  desc:"string",
},
amount:{
  amount_price:200,
  amount_measure:"USD"
},
quantity:{
quantity_number:2,
quantity_qom:"Pcs"
 }
}
}

    Regarding the usage i prefer modelmapper.