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Springboot JPA entity is auto loading lazy join entities

I have an entity as
#Getter
#Setter
#Entity
#Table(name = "feature")
#JsonIgnoreProperties({"hibernateLazyInitializer", "handler"})
public class Feature {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Integer id;
#Column(name = "name")
private String name;
#Column(name = "description")
private String description;
#OneToMany(mappedBy = "featureId", fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
private transient Collection<FeatureComponent> components;
}
While in its Repository(Dao) file, I have
public interface FeatureDao extends JpaRepository<Feature, Integer> {
#Query("SELECT e FROM Feature e")
public List<Feature> getAll();
#Query("SELECT e FROM Feature e LEFT JOIN e.components fc WHERE e.id= :id")
public Feature getWithDetail(#Param("id") Integer id);
}
When I'm calling featureDao.getAll(); it returns all features but including components list filled and because of that, my response it being too large to load on client-side.
I'm unable to understand why it is happening when I'm using Lazy fetch mode and didn't mentioned joining with components in my getAll method.
Please help to resolve that issue,
Thanks in advance.

Just like #spOOm already mentioned I also suspect this is the side effect of Jackson Feature entity serialization into JSON triggering the load of all the components.
That is why using DTOs instead of plain Entities is usually advisable when returning data via a Controller. With DTOs, you clearly define whatever you want to include in the response to the caller. You can even reorganize your model so that it fits better the needs of the clients. You decouple your inner model and the model your API consumers know, making it possible to rework your inner model and still keep the same public model. You could have the following DTO.
public class FeatureSimpleDto {
private Integer id;
private String name;
private String description;
}
Then, in your Controller or Service (here you can find different opinions) you would basically convert your Feature entity into a FeatureSimpleDto that would be returned by your Controller. Here you can use mapping libraries such as MapStruct or you can do it on your own (I usually tend to prefer doing it on my own, one less dependency to rely on).

Using Lombok may be a problem, depending on the relationship between tables, try to create getters manually in entity classes.

Thanks to everyone for providing workarounds... But every work item requires lots of changes which were not possible for me...
Luckily I found a solution that is working fine for me... Better to post here...
Step-1: Add dependency in pom.xml file
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-datatype-hibernate5</artifactId>
</dependency>
Step-2: Add a 'Bean' for Hibernate Module
We can add bean in any file having #Configuration annotation... Even, we can add in Springboot main application file(where we have main method).
#Bean
public Module datatypeHibernateModule() {
return new Hibernate5Module();
}
That's it, Happy Coding...

Best Way to SELECT subset of properties for associated #Entity

I am trying to choose the properties of associated entities that will be loaded.
For example:
#Entity
#Getter #Setter
public class Book {
#Id #GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
private Long id;
#Column(name = "first")
private String first;
#Column(name = "second")
private String second;
#OneToMany(mappedBy = "book", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private List<Page> pages = new ArrayList();
}
#Entity
#Getter #Setter
public class Page {
#Id #GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
private Long id;
#Column(name = "number")
private Integer number;
#Column(name = "content")
private String content;
#ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
#JoinColumn(name = "book_id")
private Book book;
}
I would like to have just a SELECT on the Book's first and the content of all associated Page entities
book
- first
- pages
- content
For example, in PostgreSQL this might look something like
SELECT book.first,
array_agg(page.content || ' ')
FROM book
LEFT JOIN page
ON page.book_id = book.id
GROUP BY book.first
I've done my research on how you could go about doing this, most mentioned solution is to use Spring DATA JPA Projections (ref)
I did the following:
public interface FindAllBookProjection {
String getFirst();
List<PageProjection> getPages();
interface PageProjection {
Integer getNumber();
}
}
The issue with projections is that they cause the famous N+1 select problem as the pages are loaded lazily.
I also couldn't find a way to use projections with #Query in the #Repository for the nested properties.
There are other mentions online to use #EntityGraph. From what I understand #EntityGraph will not work as it also selects all properties, specifying only what Entity associations should be loaded.
There are also suggestions on using other libraries like Blaze Persistence (ref) or Hibernate's ResultTransformer (ref) . I would prefer to use only Spring DATA JPA instead of introducing another library for this functionality and writing ResultTransformers seems like adding a lot of boilerplate code to the mix.
To summarize my question is what is the best way to choose what properties are selected for #Entity associations. The main goal is to avoid pulling unnecessary amount of data from the database. The given example above is for demonstration, the data that I am working on includes over 10 columns and spans across 3-4 entities. Having control over the data means better performance.

I am the creator of Blaze-Persistence and I can tell you that if there were an easy way to do this, I would not have created Entity-Views. You can read some of the articles I wrote about this and you will realize that doing this yourself, like you already figured, will require lots of boilerplate code. Doing this efficiently, will require even more code and in the end, you will probably end up with a solution that is inferior to Blaze-Persistence Entity-Views in one way or another and has probably no documentation.
Spring Data Projections is just limited and as I tried to outline many times before, Blaze-Persistence Entity-Views is like Spring Data Projections on steroids.
If you have "just" one or two simple mappings, you might be able to get this done by introducing special #Immutable #Entity, maybe even with #Subselect in this particular case to model what you need, but believe me, this only works good on a small scale. Apart from that, Blaze-Persistence which works on top of JPA/Hibernate enables the use of a lot of advanced SQL features, which you usually can't use from within plain JPA/Hibernate.

In my opinion, ORM libraries should use whole objects, that means loading all data into the program and then transforming/filtering according to logic.
For specific use-cases, where performance is really hindered, I'd use entities in
the database, such as Views/Procedures.
In your case, i'd create a View:
CREATE VIEW book_content as
SELECT book.first as [first],
array_agg(page.content || ' ') as [content]
FROM book
LEFT JOIN page
ON page.book_id = book.id
GROUP BY book.first
And then create a #Repository and #Entity for it in spring.

How to maintain bi-directional relationships with Spring Data REST and JPA?

Working with Spring Data REST, if you have a OneToMany or ManyToOne relationship, the PUT operation returns 200 on the "non-owning" entity but does not actually persist the joined resource.
Example Entities:
#Entity(name = 'author')
#ToString
class AuthorEntity implements Author {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
Long id
String fullName
#ManyToMany(mappedBy = 'authors')
Set<BookEntity> books
}
#Entity(name = 'book')
#EqualsAndHashCode
class BookEntity implements Book {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
Long id
#Column(nullable = false)
String title
#Column(nullable = false)
String isbn
#Column(nullable = false)
String publisher
#ManyToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, cascade = [CascadeType.ALL])
Set<AuthorEntity> authors
}
If you back them with a PagingAndSortingRepository, you can GET a Book, follow the authors link on the book and do a PUT with the URI of a author to associate with. You cannot go the other way.
If you do a GET on an Author and do a PUT on its books link, the response returns 200, but the relationship is never persisted.
Is this the expected behavior?

tl;dr
The key to that is not so much anything in Spring Data REST - as you can easily get it to work in your scenario - but making sure that your model keeps both ends of the association in sync.
The problem
The problem you see here arises from the fact that Spring Data REST basically modifies the books property of your AuthorEntity. That itself doesn't reflect this update in the authors property of the BookEntity. This has to be worked around manually, which is not a constraint that Spring Data REST makes up but the way that JPA works in general. You will be able to reproduce the erroneous behavior by simply invoking setters manually and trying to persist the result.
How to solve this?
If removing the bi-directional association is not an option (see below on why I'd recommend this) the only way to make this work is to make sure changes to the association are reflected on both sides. Usually people take care of this by manually adding the author to the BookEntity when a book is added:
class AuthorEntity {
void add(BookEntity book) {
this.books.add(book);
if (!book.getAuthors().contains(this)) {
book.add(this);
}
}
}
The additional if clause would've to be added on the BookEntity side as well if you want to make sure that changes from the other side are propagated, too. The if is basically required as otherwise the two methods would constantly call themselves.
Spring Data REST, by default uses field access so that theres actually no method that you can put this logic into. One option would be to switch to property access and put the logic into the setters. Another option is to use a method annotated with #PreUpdate/#PrePersist that iterates over the entities and makes sure the modifications are reflected on both sides.
Removing the root cause of the issue
As you can see, this adds quite a lot of complexity to the domain model. As I joked on Twitter yesterday:
#1 rule of bi-directional associations: don't use them… :)
It usually simplifies the matter if you try not to use bi-directional relationship whenever possible and rather fall back to a repository to obtain all the entities that make up the backside of the association.
A good heuristics to determine which side to cut is to think about which side of the association is really core and crucial to the domain you're modeling. In your case I'd argue that it's perfectly fine for an author to exist with no books written by her. On the flip side, a book without an author doesn't make too much sense at all. So I'd keep the authors property in BookEntity but introduce the following method on the BookRepository:
interface BookRepository extends Repository<Book, Long> {
List<Book> findByAuthor(Author author);
}
Yes, that requires all clients that previously could just have invoked author.getBooks() to now work with a repository. But on the positive side you've removed all the cruft from your domain objects and created a clear dependency direction from book to author along the way. Books depend on authors but not the other way round.

I faced a similar problem, while sending my POJO(containing bi-directional mapping #OneToMany and #ManyToOne) as JSON via REST api, the data was persisted in both the parent and child entities but the foreign key relation was not established. This happens because bidirectional associations need to be manually maintained.
JPA provides an annotation #PrePersist which can be used to make sure that the method annotated with it is executed before the entity is persisted. Since, JPA first inserts the parent entity to the database followed by the child entity, I included a method annotated with #PrePersist which would iterate through the list of child entities and manually set the parent entity to it.
In your case it would be something like this:
class AuthorEntitiy {
#PrePersist
public void populateBooks {
for(BookEntity book : books)
book.addToAuthorList(this);
}
}
class BookEntity {
#PrePersist
public void populateAuthors {
for(AuthorEntity author : authors)
author.addToBookList(this);
}
}
After this you might get an infinite recursion error, to avoid that annotate your parent class with #JsonManagedReference and your child class with #JsonBackReference. This solution worked for me, hopefully it will work for you too.

This link has a very good tutorial on how you can navigate the recursion problem:Bidirectional Relationships
I was able to use #JsonManagedReference and #JsonBackReference and it worked like a charm

I believe one can also utilize #RepositoryEventHandler by adding a #BeforeLinkSave handler to cross link the bidirectional relation between entities. This seems to be working for me.
#Component
#RepositoryEventHandler
public class BiDirectionalLinkHandler {
#HandleBeforeLinkSave
public void crossLink(Author author, Collection<Books> books) {
for (Book b : books) {
b.setAuthor(author);
}
}
}
Note: #HandlBeforeLinkSave is called based on the first parameter, if you have multiple relations in your equivalent of an Author class, the second param should be Object and you will need to test within the method for the different relation types.

Mapping JSON object to Hibernate entity

I'm going to start a project of a REST application managed with Spring and with Hibernate for my model.
I know that Spring allows you to get Java object from the HTTP Request (with #Consumes(JSON) annotation). Is there any conflict if this Java object is also a Hibernate entities? And is nested object working (like #ManyToOne relation)?

Maven dependency
The first thing you need to do is to set up the following Hibernate Types Maven dependency in your project pom.xml configuration file:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.vladmihalcea</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-types-52</artifactId>
<version>${hibernate-types.version}</version>
</dependency>
Domain model
Now, if you are using PostgreSQL, you need to use the JsonType from Hibernate Types.
In order to use it in your entities, you will have to declare it on either class level or in a package-info.java package-level descriptor, like this:
#TypeDef(name = "json", typeClass = JsonType.class)
And, the entity mapping will look like this:
#Type(type = "json")
#Column(columnDefinition = "json")
private Location location;
If you're using Hibernate 5 or later, then the JSON type is registered automatically by the Postgre92Dialect.
Otherwise, you need to register it yourself:
public class PostgreSQLDialect extends PostgreSQL91Dialect {
public PostgreSQL92Dialect() {
super();
this.registerColumnType( Types.JAVA_OBJECT, "json" );
}
}
The JsonType works with Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and H2 as well. Check out the project page for more details about how you can map JSON column types on various relational database systems.

Yes, this wouldn't be a problem and is actually a fairly common practice.
In the recent years I have come to realize that sometimes, however, it is not a good idea to always build your views based on your domain directly. You can take a look at this post:
http://codebetter.com/jpboodhoo/2007/09/27/screen-bound-dto-s/
It is also known as "Presentation Model":
http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/PresentationModel.html
The idea behind that is basically the following:
Imagine you have the domain entry User, who looks like that :
#Entity
#Data
public class User {
#Id private UUID userId;
private String username;
#OneToMany private List<Permission> permissions;
}
Let's now imagine you have a view where you wanna display that user's name, and you totally don't care about the permissions. If you use your approach of immediately returning the User to the view, Hibernate will make an additional join from the Permissions table because event though the permissions are lazily loaded by default, there is no easy way to signal to the jackson serializer or whatever you are using, that you don't care about them in this particular occasion, so jackson will try to unproxy them (if your transaction is still alive by the time your object is put for json serialization, otherwise you get a nasty exception). Yes, you can add a #JsonIgnore annotation on the permissions field, but then if you need it in some other view, you are screwed.
That a very basic example, but you should get the idea that sometimes your domain model can't be immediately used to be returned to the presentation layer, due to both code maintainability and performance issues.

We were using such approach to simplify design and get rid of many dtos (we were abusing them too much). Basically, it worked for us.
However, in our REST model we were trying to do not expose other relations for an object as you can always create another REST resources to access them.
So we just put #JsonIgnore annotations to relations mappings like #OneToMany or #ManyToOnemaking them transient.
Another problem I see that if you still like to return these relations you would have to use Join.FETCH strategy for them or move transaction management higher so that transaction still exists when a response is serialized to JSON (Open Session In View Pattern).
On my opinion these two solutions are not so good.

You can map the json request without using any library at REST web-services (Jersy)
this sample of code:
This hibernate entity called book:
#Entity
#Table(name = "book", schema = "cashcall")
public class Book implements java.io.Serializable {
private int id;
private Author author; // another hibernate entity
private String bookName;
//setters and getters
}
This web-services function
#POST
#Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
#Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public String addBook(Book book) {
String bookName=book.getName();
return bookName;
}
This is sample json request:
{
"bookName" : "Head First Java",
"author" : {
"id" : 1
}
}

Since you are just starting, perhaps you could use Spring Data REST?
This is the project: http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-rest/
And here are some simple examples:
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-book/tree/master/rest
https://github.com/olivergierke/spring-restbucks
As you can see in the examples, there are no extra DTOs beyond the #Entity annotated POJOs.

Morphia - change class associated with a collection

I'm trying to phase out an older java codebase that uses MongoDB/Morphia. During this transition, I'd like the new platform to write to the same MongoDB database/collections so that each can live side by side for a little while. That part I'm doing alright with. My issue is that in the new platform, I need a different package/class structure for the objects I'm mapping with morphia than what is currently in the collection.
For instance, in the old platform I've got this class:
package com.foo;
#Entity
public class Bar {
#Id private String id;
private String name;
...
}
In my mongo database, I now have a collection "Bar" and its documents have the className attribute set to "com.foo.Bar". That's all wonderful.
What I'd like to do in the new platform is create a brand new class in a different package to represent that entity, but have it interact with mongo in the same way. I'm hoping to be able to do something like this:
package com.foo.legacy;
#Entity("com.foo.Bar")
public class LegacyBar {
#Id private String id;
private String name;
...
}
I realize the above doesn't work, but if I change the annotation to #Entity("Bar") I don't get any errors, but when I look up entities by id, I always get null back.
So... is there any way for me to have 2 separate VMs with 2 class structures and 2 different configurations of Morpha such that each can write to the same database/collection in the same fashion?
If I change LegacyBar to just "Bar" and create it in a package called "com.foo" then everything works as expected. I would just REALLY prefer to have the flexibility to quarantine all of this legacy data in a semi-clean fashion.

Do you even need the className attribute?
You can disable it with
#Entity(value = "Bar", noClassnameStored = true)
and drop the attribute in the database.
Quoting the official documentation:
Why would you need it?
This is mainly used when storing different
entities in the same collection and reading them back as the base or
super class.
If you don't do this, it should be an easy workaround to allow different package structures.