I’m gonna introduce you to AutoMapper
In a Web API design, It's a general practice to not return the entity object directly as a response.
It is because the requesting client may or may not require all the attributes of the entity, or the Web API may need to apply some transformation over the result before sending it out to the client.
In this case, we create a DTO (Data Transfer Object) object for that entity and map the required attribute values to this object.
But we have to then create and manually assign each and every object of the entity to a corresponding DTO object. This can be painful.
AutoMapper is a library that helps simplify this approach. Here you'd create a profile for each Entity to DTO mapping and then simply call the map method.
The Mapper takes care of the instantiation and assignment based on the profile and returns the DTO instance.
You can create a profile for a single entity type, or a collection of entity types at once.
When should you use it?
Keep in mind that when you're using an additional library, you're adding more computation time to the logic.
You can use it when you have complex transformations and so many attributes in the entity to map to the DTO.
On the other hand, if your entity has very less attributes to map and is a straight forward assignment, better do an internal FromEntity method within the DTO that returns a DTO from the entity.
Because it'd only complicate things. Plus you need to also do some extra work for testing this.
That’s all you need to know to get started with AutoMapper library and it’s implications.
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