Is it a good practice to use the entity beans for front end

Question

I'm using Thymeleaf for frontend and Spring + Hibernate for the backend.

Instead of creating DTOs is it advisable to use the same entity beans for frontend. For attributes that are exclusive for frontend, we could use @Transient anyways, right?

I noticed that in PetClinic Spring Demo application they had reused the models.

Well you can ,but its not a good practice you should have a domain or model class as a layer above entities. — Shubham Dixit, Jan 15 '20 at 06:29
@Shubh aren't domain classes and entity classes (in the hibernate java world the same? — Riya Jacob, Jan 15 '20 at 12:53
You are getting confused with jpa entity ,its actually what gets persisted in db .There is a layer above it to . — Shubham Dixit, Jan 15 '20 at 13:21
Could you point me to any resources/tutorials? My understanding is `jsp/view <-> json <-> controller <-> DTO bean <-> service <-> Entity bean <-> persistence`. Any other beans needed? — Riya Jacob, Jan 15 '20 at 13:50

Pramod S. Nikam · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-15T06:16:28.167

1

Entities are Part of Domain Driven Design (DDD) and Important aspect of design of it is to have ID. These are meant to represent your entities which is long lived objects in system i.e. in DB, Storages etc.

Value Objects / Data Transfer Objects are actually meant for temporary calculations and short lived transport such as to use in Views.

I guess you will be using MVC in your project. It this aspect using Entity which is after service layer will tightly coupled entities with frontend. Which in turn against flexibility of MVC. Better refrain from it.

edited Jan 15 '20 at 06:16

answered Jan 15 '20 at 06:02

Pramod S. Nikam

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So the practice followed is copying the values from entity to view objects every time? – Riya Jacob Jan 15 '20 at 06:06
Also are there any naming conventions or practices followed for View Objects? – Riya Jacob Jan 15 '20 at 06:07
You should copy entire entiry, you should copy only fields needed in View layer – Pramod S. Nikam Jan 15 '20 at 06:07
just go for value . objets sometimes they are called as DTO ( Data Transfer Objetes ) – Pramod S. Nikam Jan 15 '20 at 06:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '20 at 19:26

You can use your domain entities instead of creating aditional view objects or DTO's. Mainly because you say it's not a huge project.

However, do not add an attribute to your domain class just for your front end needs. Even with @Transient. That's code smell for me. when you need to do this, please create a view class or DTO instead of using the domain object.

Is it a good practice to use the entity beans for front end

2 Answers2