Spring Data Rest OneToMany POST JSON With Child Entity - spring

Question

I've been searching for an answer for this since yesterday and have not been successful in finding it.
Can you save an entity with it's child entity at the same time? From what I've seen, the way to do it is to save the entity, follow the link from the response, and add the child entity. Is there a way to post it all at once?
{
"name": "some-name",
"age": "30",
"address": {
"street": "some-street",
"city": "some-city"
}
}
In the above example we have a Person entity for example and it has a OneToMany relationship to Address entity. I know that you save Person, get the link from the response, and save Address, but it would be convenient to do it all in one shot if that's possible. I am assuming that it's not possible out of the box but figured I would ask before writing a custom controller method to handle it in one shot.

Answer 1

That will work for adding a new entity via POST. For editing an existing entity this would also work via a PUT request if you include all the data and expose the IDs in the JSON.
e.g.
public class MvcConfiguration extends RepositoryRestConfigurerAdapter {
#Override
public void configureRepositoryRestConfiguration(RepositoryRestConfiguration config) {
super.configureRepositoryRestConfiguration(config);
config.exposeIdsFor(/*Person.class,*/ Address.class);
}
}
PUT /person/123
{
//"id" : 123, prob not required
"name": "new-name",
"age": "30",
"address": {
"id": 1, //required
"street": "new-street",
"city": "some-city"
}
}
I have used when there have been multiple levels of nesting and with collections but only when child entities do not have their own REST endpoints: I am not sure if that would have any bearing on things.