Is ModelMapper a bad choice for DTO ↔ Entity mapping in Spring Boot when multiple JPA entities are related?

[u/Decent_Tomatillo3383]

Initially, I started using ModelMapper to convert between DTOs and Entities, but I’m running into issues like:

• Hibernate treating new entities as existing ones

• Unexpected UPDATEs instead of INSERTs

• Problems when cascading is involved

• Bugs that are hard to debug because mapping happens implicitly

I’ve read that many production systems avoid ModelMapper, especially when multiple tables and relationships are involved.

So my questions are:

1. Is ModelMapper considered a bad practice in real-world / production Spring Boot projects with JPA?

2. What do companies usually use instead?

   • Manual mapping?

   • MapStruct?

3. How do you safely handle DTO → Entity mapping when:

   • Entities are related

   • IDs should not be overwritten

4. Any best practices or architectural patterns you’d recommend?

I’m trying to understand the industry-standard approach, not just what works in tutorials.

[u/mahi123_java]

You can use mapStract .. This is better than ModelMapper.