I dry fire my Uberti .45 all the time. If and when something breaks, I'll just get another one of those somethings from VTI gun parts. I'm not going to deprive myself of a hundred dollars worth of practice to prolong the life of a two dollar gun part. So far, after many hundreds, maybe thousands of times of being dry fired, I've had to replace the trigger/bolt spring. I don't really think it knows whether the gun's loaded or not, so it failing was caused by the number of flexes alone. Granted, that number was much, much higher than it would have been without the dry firing, but snap caps wouldn't have protected it any.
Years ago I was a member of a pistol team. We used S&W revolvers and were encouraged by our armorer, who was trained by S&W, to dry fire as much as we could. No snap caps, empty cases, nothing. I have no information whether that policy was S&W's or the armorers alone, but I have a S&W model 14 I have owned since 1972 and dry fired bazilloins of times. Still all original and going strong.
I'm not necessarily encouraging you to dry fire your .45, just giving another perspective from the more commonly heard "never dry fire" wisdom, which has a lot of validity for rimfire and percussion arms. as far as I'm concerned though, centerfires are a whole 'nother ball game.