Dhatri's clearest institutional position is in the Puranic lists. In the arrangement preserved in the Vishnu Purana, where each of the twelve Adityas presides over one month of the year and rides the sun's chariot with a fixed company of sage, gandharva, apsaras, yaksha, serpent and rakshasa, Dhatri holds the first month. That is a prominent placing for a god who has no story attached to him, and it follows from what his name means: the establisher belongs at the beginning.
The Bhagavata Purana's list of twelve keeps him and adds Vidhatri beside him, which raises the number of pure abstractions in the group by one and drops Parjanya and Amshu from it. The two lists agree on ten names and differ on four, and Dhatri is on the agreed side of that division.
His survival into the classical language is real but thin. Dhatri remains available as a word for the ordering power, is used of Brahma in devotional texts, and turns up in the formulaic pairing with Vidhatri. He acquires no temple, no festival, no iconographic type and no cult of his own at any period the record covers. The atlas gives him an entry because he is named in the lists that define the class and because a class whose members are only partly represented is a misleading thing to publish, not because he was ever an object of devotion in his own right.