DTOs: best practices?

I've been reading a few posts here regarding DTO's and it seems to me that a lot of people equate them to what I would consider a ViewModel. A DTO is just that, Data Transfer Object - it's what gets passed down the wire. So I've got a website and services, only the services will have access to real domain/entity objects, and return DTO's.

These may map 1:1, but consider that the DTO's may be populated from another service call, a database query, reading a config - whatever.

I'm kind of using DTOs in a project. I tend to make the DTOs only to show the data I need for an specified view. I fetch all the data shown in the view in my data access class.

For example, I may have an Order object which references a Client object.

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