Structured, type-safe, immutable data transfer.

Data Transfer Objects are a mechanism to facilitate transfer of data between different layers of an application. This library introduces to DataObject class which can be built from an existing associative array or standard object, using the DataObjectBuilder class.

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A DataObject has the following features:

• It is immutable, meaning that code can't modify the data it represents
• It provides type-safe getters to the contained data
• It can be nested within other DataObjects
• It can be converted to and from associative arrays and standard objects

Usage example

Load a JSON object into a DataObject, then pass to a third party library for processing.

Due to the immutability of the DataObject class, there is no risk of the third party library making changes to the contents of the data.

// Create a new Builder and build the DataObject from the remote JSON response.
$builder = new Builder();
$data = $builder->fromObject(
	json_decode(file_get_contents("http://example.com/endpoint.json"))
);

// Pass the data to a third party to process it.
ThirdParty::processData($data);

// Now we can use the data ourselves for whatever purpose:
Database::store(
	id: $data->getInt("id"),
	refname: $data->getString("name"),
);