Spring Boot many to many post method not updating data - spring

Question

My User class looks like this :
#Data
#Entity
public class User {
#Id
Long userID;
#ManyToMany(mappedBy = "admins")
private List<ClassRoom> classRooms = new ArrayList<>();
}
And my ClassRoom class like this :
#Data
#Entity
public class ClassRoom {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
Long classRoomID;
#ManyToMany
#JoinTable(name ="classroom_user",
joinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "classroom_id"),
inverseJoinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "user_id"))
private List<User> admins = new ArrayList<>();
}
And in my UserController class, I have :
#PostMapping("user/{id}/c")
User addClassRoom(#PathVariable Long id,#RequestBody ClassRoom newClassRoom)
{
logger.debug(repository.findById(id));
return repository.findById(id)
.map(user -> {
user.getClassRooms().add(newClassRoom);
user.setClassRooms(user.getClassRooms());
return repository.save(user);
})
.orElseGet(() -> {
return null;
});
}
And I POST and empty JSON ({}) and I see no change in my users. The Classroom or an empty Classroom doesn't get added in the User.
What is the problem here? How can I resolve this ?

Answer 1

user.getClassRooms().add(newClassRoom); is suffice, user.setClassRooms(user.getClassRooms()); not required.
You will have to perform cascade save operation.List all cascade types explicitly and don't use mappedBy, instead use joincolumns annotation.

Answer 2

Can you paste the logs, please? Is Hibernate doing any insert into your table? Has the database schema been created in the DB correctly? One thing I recommend you to do is to add a custom table name on the top of your User class, using annotations like so: #Table(name = "users"). In most SQL dialects user is a reserved keyword, hence it is recommended to always annotate User class a bit differently, so that Hibernate won't have any problems to create a table for that entity.

Answer 3

IMO you must find classRoom by its id from repository, if it's new, you must create a new entity and save it first. Then assign it to user and save it.
The object you receive from the post method was not created by the entity manager.

Answer 4

After using user.getClassRooms().add(newClassRoom);
We must use userRepository.save(user);