To factory or not to factory?

[Drongo_III]

I'm working on a new project and need to create DTOs for use in views (this is a Laravel project so MVC). The DTO will get created from subsets of values from 2 other models (Price, Quote). Obviously, it wouldn't be ideal to build the DTO from those models in multiple places so I want to seat that logic in a specific class.  I figure an approach is to use a factory - i.e. as a place to capture the creation of the DTO. But when I read into Factory Method and Abstract Factory  and Simple Factory this use case doesn't sound like it fits.

So my questions are:

1. Is a factory the right pattern?
2. If so, which flavour of factory would you suggest?
3. Is this the way you would approach it?  I appeal to the more experienced minds here for some insight. I work alone so it's hard sometimes to figure out the right approach.

thanks,

Drongo

 

Edited November 3, 2021 by Drongo_III

[requinix]

Need more details.

Or try from another angle. What kind of code do you want to write in order to get the data you need?

[Drongo_III]

13 hours ago, requinix said:

Need more details.

Or try from another angle. What kind of code do you want to write in order to get the data you need?

I actually dusted off my copy of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and there was a chapter on DTOs.  In that chapter it  recommends using a 'DTO Assembler' which is an type of Mapper - i.e. an intermediary to keep the DTO ignorant of the Models that supply it's data.  And this seems to solve the very problem I'm trying to solve, I just didn't have a name for it and incorrectly thought 'factory must be what i need'.

Edited November 4, 2021 by Drongo_III

[gizmola]

For anyone who might stumble upon this question in the future:

 

• Data Transfer Object (DTO)
  • For the purposes of this discussion, there are multiple Laravel Eloquent Models 
• Article on DTO in a Symfony4 REST api
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler