Hey, is there anything like partial classes in Kot...

# getting-started

[Okan Yıldırım]

Hey, is there anything like partial classes in Kotlin?
Lets say that I have a Post model with (id, title, content, createdAt, updatedAt) and I want to have only the primary fields (title, content) for the DTO
Which way would be the most efficient to handle that in Spring Boot with Kotin

[Richard Gomez]

No, unfortunately not. I recall seeing a third-party dependencies (perhaps a compiler plugin) that accomplished that, but idk how reliable that would be.

[Richard Gomez]

The most pragmatic solution is just to make separate DTOs per use case. So CreatePostDto or CreatePostRequest (pick your poison) only has title and content, and ReadPostDto has all attributes, etc.

[Okan Yıldırım]

So I would have to create both the Entity and the Dto seperately

[Okan Yıldırım]

A little bit repeating but probably won't harm anything 😄

[Richard Gomez]

A little bit repeating but probably won't harm anything

While it may seem a bit awkward, I'd argue that it's a good approach. That way your DTO models aren't tied to your entity models.

[Richard Gomez]

Of course if this is just a tiny CRUD app or whatever that probably doesn't matter. But it can be useful in large apps.

[phldavies]

Also you may wish to have extension methods to convert between them, e.g.

fun Post.toDTO() = PostDTO(title, content)

[Okan Yıldırım]

Great, thanks guys

[Okan Yıldırım]

I just want to ask a last question

[Okan Yıldırım]

Can I use

modelmapper:modelmapper

on Kotlin?

[Okan Yıldırım]

So that I can convert my DTO to Entity