Spring Data JPA - Spring Boot By Example

Simplifying persistence - even more!

Spring has always had some nice APIs to work with persistence stores. Today, we'll briefly look into their spring-data-jpa module.

About this post

As usual, this blogpost is accompanied by a github repository, which uses spring bootto show you a basic example of how the technology works. Running this spring boot example can be done by the following command:

gradle bootRun

The code

The model

As we see in all of our projects, our JPA configuration requires some entities to work with. In our example, we chose for a well-known User entity, which is just a pojo, decorated with some JPA-annotations.

@Entity

public class User {



    @Id

    @GeneratedValue(strategy= GenerationType.AUTO)

    private Long id;

    private String name;

    private String password;

}

• @Entity tells us that this class is an entity. It will therefore be a candidate for persistence. Without an @Table annotation, spring will automatically give the table a default name.
• @Id and @GeneratedValue are being used on the unique id of the entity. It will automatically generate a value for this field.

Basic service

Of course, a service layer isn't necessary to be part of your setup, but to restrict the outside world of calling methods you'd rather not want to provide, we added this extra layer.

@Service

public class UserService {

    @Autowired

    private UserRepository userRepository;

    public List<User> getAllUsers() {

        return userRepository.findAll();

    }



    public void addUser(User user) {

        userRepository.save(user);

    }

}

The simplest of repositories

public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository<User, Long>{

    User findByNameAndPassword

        (

            @Param("name") String name, 

            @Param("password") String password

        );

}

For our basic example, this will be our repository. We created an interface and extended from the JpaRepository interface, which will expose some basic operations to use on your dataset.

But mr. developer, where is the implementation?

That's the beauty of spring-data-jpa. Basic queries can be derived from the names of your methods. For more examples and info we can refer you to the spring-data-jpa documentation

Gradle dependency

compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa")

compile("com.h2database:h2")

The configuration

Booting up the example takes just a tiny configuration file. All of the configuration is done for you, automatically. You don't have to add a datasource, as spring-boot will just produce one for you.It will also automatically scan for all components and do some aop-magic to ensure a fully running application.

@Configuration

@EnableAutoConfiguration

@ComponentScan

public class JpaApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        SpringApplication.run(JpaApplication.class, args);

    }

}

Output after startup

We added a small producer class, which you'll find on github, that will produce and show the current users. When booting the example application, you'll see an output similar to this one.

c.q.s.e.caching.producer.UserProducer    : Trying to find all users.

c.q.s.e.caching.producer.UserProducer    : --No users found--

c.q.s.e.caching.producer.UserProducer    : -> Adding new user now!

c.q.s.e.caching.producer.UserProducer    : Trying to find all users.

c.q.s.e.caching.producer.UserProducer    : user with id 1 and name Quinten found :)

About the example code

The example - found on github - will contain some more examples, tests and configurations for you to fiddle with. It will be updated regularely, depending on new releases and features.

Coming up

In one of my next blogposts, I'll dig a little deeper into types of repositories, ways to extend your repositories with more complex queries and QueryDSL. I'll also show you how these repositories can be subject of simple integration-tests