Hello all,

I am posting this msg here coz I didn't find a better place to post this architectural question.

The architecture is like Struts->Service Locator->Session Facade->Business Objects->ORM->Database. For transferring data across layers we need DTO's that are again simple POJO's as Hibernate domain objects. Can we use the Hibernate domain objects as DTO's in an application ?

Tommorrow, third party clients can also connect to the application. In that case they might be exposed to the domain objects if we use them. Is that okay ?

If yes, some of the members of the DTO/domain objects need not be matched with any database field. How can we accompalish this ?


Cheers,

Nitin Dubey

We do not recommend the DTO pattern but of course you can still use it the same way you did before.

If DTO is not recommended what is the other option ? We still need to pass some data from presentation layer to the business layer ? Any other pattern you want to recommend ?

Regards,

Nitin Dubey

You can use your domain objects or a data transfer map. This is outside of the scope of Hibernate, use whatever you like.

The practical implication of passing your domain objects outside the scope of the Hibernate session (especially a concern where third-parties may be using these) is that it does present a potential problem of lazy initialization issues if you used that feature.

Consider a Conpany object with a lazy collection of Employees. If you send that Company outside the scope of the session with the Company.employees still lazy, you will not be able to initialize that employee collection.

This is not "detrimental", just something that needs to be considered.