DTO to Entity and Entity to DTO Conversion

Almost in every RESTful Web Service application, I have to do the DTO to Entity and then Entity to DTO conversion. DTO stands for Data Transfer Object and is a simple Plain Old Java Object which contains class properties and getters and settings methods for accessing those properties.

In this blog post, I am going to share with you how to copy properties from a DTO object to an Entity object and then back from an Entity object to a DTO object.

To copy properties from one bean to another I use the BeanUtils class provided by a Spring Framework:

import org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils

the use of BeanUtils is very simple. To copy properties from a source Java object to a target Java object a simple static method is used:

BeanUtils.copyProperties(sourceObject, targetObject);

Note: when using the BeanUtils.copyProperties() method, class field names in the sourceObject must match the class field names in the destination object. Have a look at the example DTO and Entity classes below:

DTO Class

Let’s say we have the following DTO Java class

package com.appsdeveloperblog.app.ws.shared.dto;

import java.io.Serializable;

public class UserDto implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 4865903039190150223L;
    private long id;
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private String email;
    private String password;
    private String encryptedPassword;
    private String userId;

 
    public long getId() {
        return id;
    }
 
    public void setId(long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }
 
    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

 
    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }

 
    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

 
    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

  
    public String getEmail() {
        return email;
    }

 
    public void setEmail(String email) {
        this.email = email;
    }

 
    public String getPassword() {
        return password;
    }

Entity Class

And let’s say we have the following entity class:

@Entity(name = "users")
public class UserEntity implements Serializable {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 4865903039190150223L;
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private long id;
 
    @Column(length = 50, nullable = false)
    private String firstName;

    @Column(length = 50, nullable = false)
    private String lastName;

    @Column(length = 100, nullable = false)
    private String email;

    @Column(nullable = false)
    private String encryptedPassword;
 
    public long getId() {
        return id;
    }
 
    public void setId(long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }
 
    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }
 
    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }
 
    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }
 
    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }
 
    public String getEmail() {
        return email;
    }
 
    public void setEmail(String email) {
        this.email = email;
    }
 
    public String getEncryptedPassword() {
        return encryptedPassword;
    }
 
    public void setEncryptedPassword(String encryptedPassword) {
        this.encryptedPassword = encryptedPassword;
    }
}

Copy Properties from DTO to Entity

To copy properties from the above mentioned DTO to an Entity object we can use the following one line of code:

UserEntity userEntity = new UserEntity();
BeanUtils.copyProperties(userDto, userEntity);

where
– userDto is a source DTO object and
– userEntity is a target object.

And this is it! Very simple and very convenient way of copying properties from one bean to another.

BeanUtils – Ignore Certain Properties

Sometimes when copying properties from an Entity object to a DTO object you might want to ignore certain properties. You can do it by using the following command:

BeanUtils.copyProperties(sourceObj, targetObj, "propertyToIgnoreA", "propertyToIgnoreB", "propertyToIgnoreC");

Just list the property names you want to ignore after the targetObj parameter.

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