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
Related
I'm rewriting a big project with SpringBoot 2.2.6 and I'm run into a problem.
In the old project (pure ejb) when a complex entity is updated, the code build entity from DTO's as follows:
public Entity dtoToEntity(DTO dto) {
Entity entity = new Entity();
entity.setId(dto.getID());
// ecc...
// ecc...
entity.setSubEntity(dto.getSubEntity() != null ? new SubEntity(dto.getSubEntity().getId() : null);
// and so on
}
The important section is that related to subentity! After made a mapping like that the old project calls:
EntityManager.merge(entity);
I think that with merge call, if inside the database exists a SubEntity with specified id and other fields valorized, the other fields remain valid and are not set to null because they aren't declared in mapping.
But with SpringBoot I'm using JpaRepository and I don't think the same thing happens if I call:
jpaRepository.save(entity);
I think with this call the other fields of SubEntity with specified id will set to null!
Is it correct?
What can I solve this?
Thanks for your reply first of all!
You are right, I can't do something like that nor with EntityManager.merge() method! Than I try to explain better what I want to do:
Suppose I have a complex Entity, which has many nested Entities (which may have nested entities) as follows:
#Entity
public class Car {
private String name;
....
....
private Engine engine; // nested entity
private Chassis chassis; // nested entity
}
And:
#Entity
public class Engine {
private String company;
private Oil oil; // nested entity
....
}
Now suppose in the database I have a Car, with all relationship filled (Engine, Chassis, Oil ecc..) and suppose I want to update the Car name from Ferrari to Fiat, if I use pure SQL I can simply write:
update Car c set c.name = "Fiat" where c.id = [id];
Now if I use Spring JPA, to ensure that all nested entity (and their field) are not setting to null when I update my entity I have to do:
Car car = carRepository.findById([id]);
car.setName("Fiat"):
carRepository.save(car);
This way I will update Car name and I'm sure that all other entities will remain set because are loaded by findById() method.
My question and my goal is to know if is there a way to do something like that:
Car car = new Car();
car.setId(1); // id of Ferrari car
car.setName("Fiat");
someRepositoryOrEntityManager.saveOrUpdate(car);
And preserve all other field and relation without load all of these by the find method (maybe due to a performance reasons).
Did you give it a try or it is just guesswork?
First of all, you don't need to embrace spring data repositories. You can inject EntityManager if it helps in the migration process.
Secondly, look at the implementation of SimpleJpaRepository.save
#Transactional
public <S extends T> S save(S entity) {
if (entityInformation.isNew(entity)) {
em.persist(entity);
return entity;
} else {
return em.merge(entity);
}
}
This means that JpaRepository.save calls em.merge if it concludes that the entity is not new.
The check if the entity is new is in AbstractEntityInformation.isNew. It concludes that the entity is new only if its id is null (or 0 for primitive numerical types).
You assign the id from the dto. If it is not null (or non-zero for primitives), there is no reason to believe that the new code will behave in a different way than the old one.
Answer for updated question
If you want to modify an entity without fetching it, I would suggest JPQL or criteria query
Reference:
More about whether an entity is new or not, can be found here.
I have been working to generalize the methods of the DAO for a project using Spring, JPA and Hibernate. However, I am still very much learning Spring, Java, and coding in general.
Is the below design bad or perfectly fine? Is there a better way to accomplish the same thing? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I have simplified the class:
#Repository
public class TestRepository
{
#PersistenceContext
private EntityManager entityManager;
public List<?> getListResults(Class<?> dtoClass, String sqlString)
{
List<?> returnList = null;
Query query = entityManager.createNativeQuery(sqlString, dtoClass);
try
{
returnList = (List<?>) query.getResultList();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
}
return returnList;
}
}
Spring Data JPA is the must convenient way in order to interact with your databases because it helps you to avoid the common mistakes that occurs when you try to configure your ORM mapping, entityManager, transacctionManager and all the rest of necessary components in order to establish a communication between your entity domains and your database.
For example you have a pojo like this:
#Entity
public class Item {
#Id
private Long id;
......
}
You can create an interface in order to get or put information to the item repository like this:
public interface ItemRepository extends from JpaRepository<Item,Long>{}
When you need to save the Item just #Autowired the ItemRepository, this is the must important part because the previous interface that is created without methods now exposes ready-to-work methods that will interact with your database, this is the abstraction level that makes Spring Data JPA very useful:
#Autowired
ItemRepository itemRepo
public void createItem(){
Item item = new Item();
itemRepo.save(item);
//or you can get information
List<Item> itemList = itemRepo.findAll();
}
More information in Spring Data JPA Documentation
How about using Spring Data Repositories?
#Repository
public interface SomethingRepository extends JpaRepository<Something, Long> {
}
That way you get lots of methods without having to manually write your SQL query as a string, you retain type safety and you can leverage the power of JPA queries and dynamic proxies that do this whole SQL business for you.
I have an entity that looks like this:
#Entity
#Table(uniqueConstraints={#UniqueConstraint(columnNames={"slug"})})
public class BlogPost {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long id;
#Column
private String title;
#Column
private String slug;
}
I would like to generate the value of slug before persisting by doing the following:
Transforming the title from e.g. Blog Post Title to blog-post-title
Making sure that blog-post-title is unique in table BlogPost, and if it's not unique, I want to append some suffix to the title so it becomes e.g. blog-post-title-2
Since I need this on a lot of entities, my original idea was to create an EntityListener which would do this at #PrePersist. However, documentation generally states that I should not call EntityManager or Query methods and should not access any other entity objects from lifecycle callbacks. I need to do that in order to make sure that my generated slug is indeed unique.
I tried to be cheeky, but it is indeed very hard to autowire a repository into an EntityListener with Spring anyway.
How should I best tackle this problem?
Thanks!
Both OndrejM and MirMasej are definitely right that generating a slug would not be something to be done in an Entity. I was hoping EntityListeners could be a little "smarter", but that's not an option.
What I ended up doing is using aspects to accomplish what I wanted. Instead of "hooking" into entities, I am rather hooking into save method of CrudRepository.
First, I created an annotation so I can recognize which field needs to be sluggified:
#Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
#Target(ElementType.FIELD)
public #interface Slug {
/**
* The string slug is generated from
*/
String source() default "title";
/**
* Strategy for generating a slug
*/
Class strategy() default DefaultSlugGenerationStrategy.class;
}
Then, I created an aspect which is something like this:
#Aspect
#Component
public class SlugAspect {
... // Removed some code for bravity
#Before("execution(* org.springframework.data.repository.CrudRepository+.save(*))")
public void onRepoSave(JoinPoint joinPoint) throws NoSuchMethodException, IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException, InstantiationException {
Object entity = joinPoint.getArgs()[0];
for (Field field: entity.getClass().getDeclaredFields()) {
Slug annotation = field.getAnnotation(Slug.class);
if (annotation != null) {
CrudRepository repository = (CrudRepository) joinPoint.getTarget();
Long count = 0L;
SlugGenerationStrategy generator = (SlugGenerationStrategy)annotation.strategy().newInstance();
String slug = generator.generateSlug(slugOrigin(entity));
if (id(entity) != null) {
Method method = repository.getClass().getMethod("countBySlugAndIdNot", String.class, Long.class);
count = (Long)method.invoke(repository, slug, id(entity));
} else {
Method method = repository.getClass().getMethod("countBySlug", String.class);
count = (Long)method.invoke(repository, slug);
}
// If count is zero, use the generated slug, or generate an incremented slug if count > 0 and then set it like so:
setSlug(entity, slug);
}
}
}
}
I put the code on github (though it's still just a proof of concept) if anyone is interested at: https://github.com/cabrilo/jpa-slug
It relies on having CrudRepository from Spring Data and having these two methods on a repo: countBySlug and countBySlugAndIdNot.
Thanks again for the answers.
The most straightforward solutions seems to make a check before setting the value of the title. It would mean however that the logic of calculating the slug would be outside of the entity and both would come from outside.
You have to think of an entity as a plain object without any connection to the database - this is the idea of ORM. However, you may pass a reference to EntityManager or DAO as an additional argument to a setter method, or somehow inject a reference to it. Then you may call a query directly from the setter method. The drawback of this solution is that you need to always provide EntityManager, either when you set title, or when you create/load the entity.
This is the best object oriented way of solving this problem.
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.
what's the best solution to set a value for a field marked #Transient after the entity has been read from the data source?
I'm using EclipseLink and I'm trying the DescriptorEventAdapter with his postBuild event solution because I need also to get the default value using a Spring bean (obviuosly using DI), but I would know if there is any simpler solution that I'm missing.
Thanks in advance
Here's the simple approach if you're using a repository or DAO:
#Repository
class YourRepository {
#Autowired
private Bean bean;
#PersistenceContext
private EntityManager entityManager;
#Transactional(readOnly = true)
public YourEntity find(..) {
YourEntity entity = lookupUsingEntityManager();
entity.transientField = bean.getDefaultValue();
return entity;
}
}
Here's another approach if you are using active record -style entities:
#Entity
class YourEntity {
#Transient
public Object field;
#PostLoad
public void populateField() {
field = new BeanHolder().bean.getDefaultValueForField();
}
#Configurable
private static class BeanHolder {
#Autowired private Bean bean;
}
}
Mind the semi-pseudo-code. Note that the latter approach works only if you use compile- or load-time AspectJ weaving with <context:spring-configured />.
You got entity which has transient field and the value is always taken from service using DI?
What is the purpose of the field? It's used for some calculation within any entity method?
Such calculation should probably use service's method to obtain the value.
As value from any service is used, I'm not sure whether such calculation (method) belong into entity.
Note that entity and service has completely different lifecycle. The value is changing in the time so it does not make the sense to supply the value in entity's factory at the beginning of it's life?