DTO Pattern Spring Boot

DTO (Data Transfer Object) is a design pattern that is used to transfer data between layers of an application. In this article, we will look at how to implement the DTO pattern in Spring Boot.

First, let's define the User entity class that contains the data we want to transfer. The User entity class has the following fields: firstName, secondName, age, password, createdAt, and username. Here's an example of the User entity class:

typescriptCopy codeimport java.util.Date;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.GenerationType;
import javax.persistence.Id;

@Entity
public class User {
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
  private Long id;
  private String firstName;
  private String secondName;
  private int age;
  private String password;
  private Date createdAt;
  private String username;

  // Getters and setters
}

Next, we need to create a repository class that can retrieve all users and a single user by ID. We can do this using the JpaRepository interface provided by Spring Data. Here's an example of the UserRepository interface:

javaCopy codeimport org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository;

@Repository
public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository<User, Long> {
  User findById(long id);
}

This repository extends the JpaRepository interface and adds a custom method findById that returns a single User object by its ID. With this repository in place, we can easily retrieve all users or a single user by ID using the provided methods.

Now, let's create a mapper class that maps a User entity to a UserDTO class that contains only the firstName, secondName, username, and age fields. We can use the MapStruct library to create this mapper class. Here's an example of the UserMapper interface:

To use MapStruct in your Spring Boot project, you need to add the following dependency in your pom.xml file:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.mapstruct</groupId>
  <artifactId>mapstruct</artifactId>
  <version>1.4.0.Final</version>
</dependency>

kotlinCopy codeimport org.mapstruct.Mapper;
import org.mapstruct.Mapping;
import org.mapstruct.factory.Mappers;

@Mapper
public interface UserMapper {
  UserMapper INSTANCE = Mappers.getMapper(UserMapper.class);

  @Mapping(target = "firstName", source = "firstName")
  @Mapping(target = "secondName", source = "secondName")
  @Mapping(target = "username", source = "username")
  @Mapping(target = "age", source = "age")
  UserDTO userToUserDTO(User user);
}

This mapper class uses the @Mapper annotation to mark this interface as a MapStruct mapper. The @Mapping annotations specify which fields to map from the User entity to the UserDTO class.

Finally, we need to create a UserMapperService class that provides a method to map a User entity to a UserDTO object using the `UserMapper

import java.util.List;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

@Service
public class UserMapperService {
  public UserDTO toUserDTO(User user) {
    return UserMapper.INSTANCE.userToUserDTO(user);
  }

  public List<UserDTO> toUserDTOList(List<User> users) {
    return users.stream().map(user -> toUserDTO(user)).collect(Collectors.toList());
  }
}

The toUserDTOList method takes a list of User entities as input and maps each of them to a UserDTO object using the toUserDTO method. The result is a list of UserDTO objects. This method is useful when you need to return multiple User entities as multiple UserDTO objects, for example, when retrieving a list of all users from the database.