What is Data Transfer Object?

Question

What is a Data Transfer Object?

In MVC are the model classes DTO, and if not what are the differences and do we need both?

Answer 1

A DTO is a dumb object - it just holds properties and has getters and setters, but no other logic of any significance (other than maybe a compare() or equals() implementation).

Typically model classes in MVC (assuming .net MVC here) are DTOs, or collections/aggregates of DTOs