Thursday, May 31, 2012

Mapping between Entity Objects and DTOs

Very often, we need to map between our Entity objects and DTO's. This mapping code can be quite tedious to write.
There is a lot of hot debate on whether to use DTO's or just pass the entity objects directly to the view or webservices. There are pros and cons of each approach. Some good links on this debate are listed here:

Data Transfer Object - MSDN

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5216633/jpa-entities-and-vs-dtos

Pros and Cons of Data Transfer Objects 

If you are using popular ORM tools such as Hibernate, iBatis or any other JPA complaint tool, then it may not even be possible to use the Enrity objects directly in your service or presentation tier. This is because these ORM toolkits typically use some kind of byte-code instrumentation to do the persistance magic behind the scenes. A good link explaining this is available here.

To avoid the drudgery of writing the 'Adapter/Mapping' code for each Entity object and DTO object, we can use some cool AutoMapper tools. These AutoMapper tools work on Reflection techniques and automatically map the source and target object properties. Custom mapping is supported using XML configuration or through code.

In the .NET world, there is a popular AutoMapper tool that has become the de-facto standard for a lot of .NET projects. In the Java world, there are 2 popular alternatives - Dozer and ModelMapper.
I found Dozer to be more comprehensive with some pretty good features. The usage is super-simple if you use the Singleton Wrapper and place the custom mapping file in the classpath.

If you are using the Spring Framework, then the 'BeanUtils' class has some simple static methods to copy properties from one object to the other. 

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