Type-safe, test-friendly, and extendable DTO

dto-core is a lightweight, typed, and flexible base layer for working with Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) in PHP 8.1+.
It supports strict/lenient modes, nested DTOs, lazy evaluation via Closure, and full debug output.

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🚀 Features

• 🔒 Strict or lenient validation modes
• 🧱 Full support for nested DTOs (recursive)
• 🧪 Property type validation and class-level error tracking
• ⚡ make() method (recommended) for flexible and different modes using, or new DTOClass() for strict using
• 📚 toArray() method converts the current object instance into an array representation
• 🧩 Closure support for lazy-loaded properties
• 🔧 debug() method with full structural output
• 📤 Framework-agnostic — works with pure PHP classes
• 🔩 Optimized for PHP 8.1+
• ⚙️ Compatible with Symfony 6.4, Laravel 10+, and modern typed PHP codebases.

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🧬 Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or higher
• symfony/var-dumper

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🛠 Installation

Add to composer.json

"repositories": [
  {
    "type": "vcs",
    "url": "https://github.com/technoquill/dto-core"
  }
]

composer require technoquill/dto-core

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⚙️ Quick Example

final class PaymentDTO extends AbstractDTO
{
    public function __construct(
        public int $id,
        public string $type,
        public float $amount,
        public string $name,
        public string $email,
        public string $phone,
        public string $annotation,
        public bool $is_paid
    ) {}
}

// Create via array
$data = [
    'id' => 1,
    'type' => 'paypal',
    'amount' => 100.55,
    'name' => 'John',
    'email' => 'john@example.com',
    'phone' => '123456789',
    'annotation' => fn() => strip_tags('<p>Note</p>'),
    'is_paid' => true
];

$payment = PaymentDTO::make($data, strict: false)->debug();
// or
$payment = PaymentDTO::make($data, strict: false);
if (!$payment->isValid()) {
    dump($payment->getErrors());
}

// Data output to an array is supported
$payment = PaymentDTO::make($data)->toArray();

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✒️ Constructor-Based Instantiation

DTOs can also be instantiated directly via the constructor (including nested DTOs), but all values must be fully typed and pre-resolved.

$payment = (new PaymentDTO(
    1, 'paypal', 100.00, 'John', 'john@example.com', '123456789', 'test', true, new OrderDTO(
        1, new UserDTO(1, 'User Name')
    )
))->toArray();

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🧩 Nested DTO Support

final class OrderDTO extends AbstractDTO {
    public function __construct(
        public int $id,
        public PaymentDTO $payment
    ) {}
}

$order = OrderDTO::make([
    'id' => 10,
    'payment' => $data
], false);

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📚 Project Structure

src/
├── AbstractDTO.php
├── Contracts/
│   └── DTOInterface.php
├── Traits/
│   ├── DTOTrait.php
│   └── DebuggableTrait.php

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🔖 License

This package is released under the MIT license.
© technoquill