I am very much new to Spring REST Api. Couple of doubts:
DOUBT1:
class UserDTO {
long id;
String name;
int age;
// getters and setters
}
CASE1:
public void doSomethng(#RequestBody UserDTO userDTO){
repository.findById(userDTO.getId());
}
CASE2:
public void doSomethng(#RequestBody long id){ //Is this correct?
repository.findById(id);
}
CASE3:
public void doSomethng(#RequestBody Map<Long, Object> map){ //Is this correct?
repository.findById(map.get("id"));
}
I actually need to pass only "id" for POST Request.
So, Out of above 3 cases, which is a good practice? for me long id seems reasonable. I am not understanding, in which cases Passing Map as RequestBody is much better than DTO?
DOUBT2:
I am currently using DTOs as BiDirectional. So, Using Bidirectional for DTOs is correct? Will am I going to face any issues with below DTOs design?
class UserDTO {
long id;
List<OrderDTO> orders;
}
class OrderDTO {
long orderId;
UserDTO userDTO;
}
So, Out of above 3 cases, which is a good practice? for me long id seems reasonable. I am not understanding, in which cases Passing Map as RequestBody is much better than DTO?
For above case, since you just need the id field, and want to perform a search on the basis of it, my suggestion would be to use a #PathVariable for it. See below example:
#GetMapping(value="find/{id}")
public void find(#PathVariable Long id) {
repository.findById(map.get("id"));
}
Also, Map should be considered for trivial payloads. If your payload has a complex structure with a number of nested JSON objects, you should use a DTO.
I am currently using DTOs as BiDirectional. So, Using Bidirectional for DTOs is correct? Will am I going to face any issues with below DTOs design?
I don't see a problem with using bidirectional DTOs as these are just a means to transform your request/reponse data within the application. Had they been bidirectional entities, it would have been a problem w.r.t serialization.
Hope this helps!
Related
Good day fellow hibernators!
I have a question on how the DistinctBy clause works in conjunction with Spring Data's projection
Assume I have 3 classes:
public class Task {
Long id;
#ManyToOne(fetch = LAZY)
#JoinColumn(name = "project_id")
private Project project;
#OneToOne
#JoinColumn(name = "contact_id")
private Contact assigned;
Boolean deleted;
// ...
}
public class Contact {
Long id;
// ...
}
public class Project {
Long id;
#OneToMany(fetch = LAZY, mappedBy = "project")
private Set<Task> tasks;
// ...
}
These would be my domain classes. Notice, Project does have a "One2Many" to Tasks, Contact does not. Now, I have 2 interfaces for my projections and the basic TaskRepo with 2 methods:
public interface JustProject {
Project getProject();
}
public interface JustAssignee {
Contact getContact();
}
public class TaskRepo extends CrudRepository<Task, Long>, JpaSpecificationExecutor<Task> {
List<JustAssignee> findDistinctByDeletedFalse();
List<JustProject> findDistinctByDeletedFalseAndDeletedFalse();
}
The way it works for me right now is that, findDistinctByDeletedFalse returns as many instances as there are distinct contacts for tasks (e.g. if there are 10 tasks but only 3 contacts, the method will return just 3 objects containing all the 3 distinct contacts). Same for findDistinctByDeletedFalseAndDeletedFalse but on project level.
Now I have a few questions here and would love to get some help in understanding how this works exactly.
is the distinct clause applied after the search is done?
my initial assumption was that this behavior would not work as it does now. I assumed that the distinct clause is applied before the result is fetched, meaning that it would be DISTINCT based on the underlying task model, not the returned JustContact or JustProject model.
is there any way I could somehow not abuse the ...AndDeletedFalse redundant appendix? I need both the two methods from the repo but I feel like I had to cheat just to obtain that result...
... am I doing something wrong? I wanted to get "all distinct contacts/projects assigned to all tasks" as elegant of a way as possible. I ended up thinking about this distinctby exactly because I was unsure on how it works and wanted to try mu luck out. I really didn't think it would work this way, but now that it does I would really want to understand why it does!
Many thanks <3
The DISTINCT keyword is applied to the query and therefore it's effect depends on the select list which in turn is controlled by the projection. Therefore if you have only project or only contact in your projection the DISTINCT will get applied to those values only. Note though, that this relies somewhat on the boundaries of the JPA specification and I wouldn't be surprised if you see different behaviour with different implementations. See https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jpa-api/issues/189 and https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jpa-api/issues/124 for somewhat related issues raised against the specification.
In oder to differentiate methods that otherwise only differ in the return value you might add any additional string between find and By in the method name. For example you might want to rename your methods to findDistinctContactsByDeletedFalse and findDistinctProjectsByDeletedFalse
I guess this is the best that you can get with Spring Data JPA. You might be able to use just a single method by using the dynamic projections approach, but I think this is a perfect use case for Blaze-Persistence Entity Views.
I created the library to allow easy mapping between JPA models and custom interface or abstract class defined models, something like Spring Data Projections on steroids. The idea is that you define your target structure(domain model) the way you like and map attributes(getters) via JPQL expressions to the entity model.
A DTO model for your use case could look like the following with Blaze-Persistence Entity-Views:
#EntityView(Task.class)
public interface TaskAggregateDto {
// A synthetic "id" to get a grouping context on object level
#IdMapping("1")
int getGroupKey();
Set<ProjectDto> getProjects();
Set<ContactDto> getContacts();
#EntityView(Project.class)
interface ProjectDto {
#IdMapping
Long getId();
String getName();
}
#EntityView(Contact.class)
interface ContactDto {
#IdMapping
Long getId();
String getName();
}
}
The Spring Data integration allows you to use it almost like Spring Data Projections: https://persistence.blazebit.com/documentation/entity-view/manual/en_US/index.html#spring-data-features
public interface TaskRepo extends CrudRepository<Task, Long>, JpaSpecificationExecutor<Task> {
TaskAggregateDto findOneByDeletedFalse();
}
Using spring-data-jpa and working on getting data out of table where there are about a dozen columns which are used in queries to find particular rows, and then a payload column of clob type which contains the actual data that is marshalled into java objects to be returned.
Entity object very roughly would be something like
#Entity
#Table(name = "Person")
public class Person {
#Column(name="PERSON_ID", length=45) #Id private String personId;
#Column(name="NAME", length=45) private String name;
#Column(name="ADDRESS", length=45) private String address;
#Column(name="PAYLOAD") #Lob private String payload;
//Bunch of other stuff
}
(Whether this approach is sensible or not is a topic for a different discussion)
The clob column causes performance to suffer on large queries ...
In an attempt to improve things a bit, I've created a separate entity object ... sans payload ...
#Entity
#Table(name = "Person")
public class NotQuiteAWholePerson {
#Column(name="PERSON_ID", length=45) #Id private String personId;
#Column(name="NAME", length=45) private String name;
#Column(name="ADDRESS", length=45) private String address;
//Bunch of other stuff
}
This gets me a page of NotQuiteAPerson ... I then query for the page of full person objects via the personIds.
The hope is that in not using the payload in the original query, which could filtering data over a good bit of the backing table, I only concern myself with the payload when I'm retrieving the current page of objects to be viewed ... a much smaller chunk.
So I'm at the point where I want to map the contents of the original returned Page of NotQuiteAWholePerson to my List of Person, while keeping all the Paging info intact, the map method however only takes a Converter which will iterate over the NotQuiteAWholePerson objects ... which doesn't quite fit what I'm trying to do.
Is there a sensible way to achieve this ?
Additional clarification for #itsallas as to why existing map() will not suffice..
PageImpl::map has
#Override
public <S> Page<S> map(Converter<? super T, ? extends S> converter) {
return new PageImpl<S>(getConvertedContent(converter), pageable, total);
}
Chunk::getConvertedContent has
protected <S> List<S> getConvertedContent(Converter<? super T, ? extends S> converter) {
Assert.notNull(converter, "Converter must not be null!");
List<S> result = new ArrayList<S>(content.size());
for (T element : this) {
result.add(converter.convert(element));
}
return result;
}
So the original List of contents is iterated through ... and a supplied convert method applied, to build a new list of contents to be inserted into the existing Pageable.
However I cannot convert a NotQuiteAWholePerson to a Person individually, as I cannot simply construct the payload... well I could, if I called out to the DB for each Person by Id in the convert... but calling out individually is not ideal from a performance perspective ...
After getting my Page of NotQuiteAWholePerson I am querying for the entire List of Person ... by Id ... in one call ... and now I am looking for a way to substitute the entire content list ... not interively, as the existing map() does, but in a simple replacement.
This particular use case would also assist where the payload, which is json, is more appropriately persisted in a NoSql datastore like Mongo ... as opposed to the sql datastore clob ...
Hope that clarifies it a bit better.
You can avoid the problem entirely with Spring Data JPA features.
The most sensible way would be to use Spring Data JPA projections, which have good extensive documentation.
For example, you would first need to ensure lazy fetching for your attribute, which you can achieve with an annotation on the attribute itself.
i.e. :
#Basic(fetch = FetchType.LAZY) #Column(name="PAYLOAD") #Lob private String payload;
or through Fetch/Load Graphs, which are neatly supported at repository-level.
You need to define this one way or another, because, as taken verbatim from the docs :
The query execution engine creates proxy instances of that interface at runtime for each element returned and forwards calls to the exposed methods to the target object.
You can then define a projection like so :
interface NotQuiteAWholePerson {
String getPersonId();
String getName();
String getAddress();
//Bunch of other stuff
}
And add a query method to your repository :
interface PersonRepository extends Repository<Person, String> {
Page<NotQuiteAWholePerson> findAll(Pageable pageable);
// or its dynamic equivalent
<T> Page<T> findAll(Pageable pageable, Class<T>);
}
Given the same pageable, a page of projections would refer back to the same entities in the same session.
If you cannot use projections for whatever reason (namely if you're using JPA < 2.1 or a version of Spring Data JPA before projections), you could define an explicit JPQL query with the columns and relationships you want, or keep the 2-entity setup. You could then map Persons and NotQuiteAWholePersons to a PersonDTO class, either manually or (preferably) using your object mapping framework of choice.
NB. : There are a variety of ways to use and setup lazy/eager relations. This covers more in detail.
I got a problem with simple Spring Data issue. Let's assume we got two entities.
public class Request {
// all normal stuff
#ManyToOne
private Document doc;
}
public class Document {
private Long id;
private String name;
}
Simple relation. My question is - is it possible to retrieve Request entities using Spring Data Method-DSL and sorting by Document? So what I want to achieve is to create repository method like:
public List<Request> findAllOrderByDoc()
or similar:
public List<Request> findAllOrderByDocId()
Unfortunately when I try that I am given error message saying that there is no Doc field or it cannot be mapped to long. I assume it is possible to be done using QueryDSL and predicates but I am wondering if this pretty obvious and simple thing can be done by plain Spring Data?
Yes, sure.
you need to provide the direction:
public List<Request> findAllOrderByDocAsc()
public List<Request> findAllOrderByDocDesc()
I am using a Spring Data JpaRepository, with Hibernate as JPA provider.
Normally when working directly with Hibernate, the decision between EntityManager#persist() and EntityManager#save() is up to the programmer. With Spring Data repositories, there is only save(). I do not want to discuss the pros and cons here. Let us consider the following, simple base class:
#MappedSuperclass
public abstract class PersistableObject {
#Id
private String id;
public PersistableObject(){
this.id = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
}
// hashCode() and equals() are implemented based on equality of 'id'
}
Using this base class, the Spring Data repository cannot tell which Entities are "new" (have not been saved to DB yet), as the regular check for id == null clearly does not work in this case, because the UUIDs are eagerly assigned to ensure the correctness of equals() and hashCode(). So what the repository seems to do is to always invoke EntityManager#merge() - which is clearly inefficient for transient entities.
The question is: how do I tell JPA (or Spring Data) that an Entity is new, such that it uses EntityManager#persist() instead of #merge() if possible?
I was thinking about something along these lines (using JPA lifecycle callbacks):
#MappedSuperclass
public abstract class PersistableObject {
#Transient
private boolean isNew = true; // by default, treat entity as new
#PostLoad
private void loaded(){
// a loaded entity is never new
this.isNew = false;
}
#PostPersist
private void saved(){
// a saved entity is not new anymore
this.isNew = false;
}
// how do I get JPA (or Spring Data) to use this method?
public boolean isNew(){
return this.isNew;
}
// all other properties, constructor, hashCode() and equals same as above
}
I'd like to add one more remark here. Even though it only works for Spring Data and not for general JPA, I think it's worth mentioning that Spring provides the Persistable<T> interface which has two methods:
T getId();
boolean isNew();
By implementing this interface (e.g. as in the opening question post), the Spring Data JpaRepositories will ask the entity itself if it is new or not, which can be pretty handy in certain cases.
Maybe you should add #Version column:
#Version
private Long version
in the case of new entity it will be null
In our Restful application we decided to use DTO's to shield the Hibernate domain model for several reasons.
We map Hibernate entities to DTO and vice versa manually using DTOMappers in the Service Layer.
Example in Service Layer:
#Transactional(readOnly=true)
public PersonDTO findPersonWithInvoicesById(Long id) {
Person person = personRepository.findById(id);
return PersonMapperDTOFactory.getInstance().toDTO(person);
}
The main concept could be explained like this:
JSON (Jackson parser) <-> Controller <-> Service Layer (uses Mapping Layer) <-> Repository
We agreed that we retrieve associations by performing a HQL (or Criteria) using a left join.
This is mostly a performant way to retrieve relations and avoids the N+1 select issue.
However, it's still possible to have the N+1 select issue when a developer mistakenly forgets to do a left join. The relations will still be fetched because the PersonDTOMapper will iterate over the Invoices of a Person for converting to InvoiceDTOs. So the data is still fetched because the DTOMapper is executed where a Hibernate Session is active (managed by Spring)
Is there some way to make the Hibernate Session 'not active' in our DTOMappers? We would face a LazyInitializationException that should trigger the developer that he didn't fetch some data like it should.
I've read about #Transactional(propagation = Propagation.NOT_SUPPORTED) that suspends the transaction. However, I don't know that it was intended for such purposes.
What is a clean solution to achieve this? Alternatives are also very welcome!
Usually I use the mapper in the controller layer. From my prspective, the service layer manages the application business logic, dtos are very useful if you want to rapresent data to the external world in a different way. In this way you may get the lazy inizitalization excpetion you are looking for.
I have one more reason to prefer this solution: just image you need to invoke a public method inside a public method in the service class: in this case you might need to call the mapper several times.
If you are using Hibernate, then there are specific ways that you can determine if an associated object has been lazy-loaded.
For example, let's say you have an entity class Foo that contains a #ManyToOne 'foreign' association to entity class Bar which is represented by a field in Foo called bar.
In you DTO mapping code you can check if the associated bar has been lazy-loaded using the following code:
if (!(bar instanceof HibernateProxy) ||
!((HibernateProxy)bar).getHibernateLazyInitializer().isUninitialized()) {
// bar has already been lazy-loaded, so we can
// recursively load a BarDTO for the associated Bar object
}
The simplest solution to achieve what you desire is to clear the entity manager after querying and before invoking the DTO mapper. That way, the object will be detached and access to uninitialized assocations will trigger a LazyInitializationException instead.
I felt your pain as well which drove me to developing Blaze-Persistence Entity Views which allows you to define DTOs as interfaces and map to the entity model, using the attribute name as default mapping, which allows very simple looking mappings.
Here a little example
#Entity
class Person {
#Id Long id;
String name;
String lastName;
String address;
String city;
String zipCode;
}
#EntityView(Person.class)
interface PersonDTO {
#IdMapping Long getId();
String getName();
}
Querying would be as simple as
#Transactional(readOnly=true)
public PersonDTO findPersonWithInvoicesById(Long id) {
return personRepository.findById(id);
}
interface PersonRepository extends EntityViewRepository<PersonDTO, Long> {
PersonDTO findById(Long id);
}
Since you seem to be using Spring data, you will enjoy the spring data integration.