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 UserDTO extends AbstractDTO
{
    public function __construct(
        public int    $id,
        public string $type,
        public string $first_name,
        public string $last_name,
        public string $email,
        public string $phone,
        public array  $address = [], // for ex. relation
        public string $annotation,
        public bool   $blocked,
        public string $created_at
    )
    {}
}

final class UserAddressDTO extends AbstractDTO
{
    public function __construct(
        public string  $street,
        public string  $city,
        public string  $postalCode,
        public string  $country,
        public ?string $state = null,
        public ?string $houseNumber = null,
        public ?string $apartment = null
    )
    {}
}

// Create via array
$user = UserDTO::make([
    'id' => 435,
    'type' => 'manager',
    'first_name' => 'John',
    'last_name' => 'Smith',
    'email' => 'john@example.com',
    'phone' => '123456789',
    'address' => UserAddressDTO::make([
        'street' => '123 Main St',
        'city' => 'New York',
        'postalCode' => '10001',
        'country' => 'USA',
        //'state' => 'NY', // optional; dto makes it nullable
        'houseNumber' => '123',
        'apartment' => '123A',
    ])->toArray(),
    'annotation' => static fn() => strip_tags('<p>Some annotation</p>'),
    'blocked' => false,
    'created_at' => '2022-10-03 22:59:52'
])->toArray();

dd($user);

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

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

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🧩 Nested DTO Support

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

$order = OrderDTO::make([
    'id' => 10,
    'payment' => PaymentDTO::make([
        'id' => 435,
        'amount' => 765.35,
    ])
]);

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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.

Note:
Always works in strict mode

$payment = (new PaymentDTO(435, 765.35))->toArray();

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📚 Project Structure

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

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🔖 License

This package is released under the MIT license.
© technoquill