Data Transfer Objects Best Practices & Conventions
- Do define DTOs in the application contracts package.
- Do inherit from the pre-built base DTO classes where possible and necessary (like
EntityDto<TKey>
,CreationAuditedEntityDto<TKey>
,AuditedEntityDto<TKey>
,FullAuditedEntityDto<TKey>
and so on). - Do define DTO members with public getter and setter.
- Do use data annotations for validation on the properties of DTOs those are inputs of the service.
- Do not add any logic into DTOs except implementing
IValidatableObject
when necessary. - Do mark all DTOs as [Serializable] since they are already serializable and developers may want to binary serialize them.