Exploring Spring Data REST features

In this app I'm testing Spring Data Rest features to validate them in a production project.
For more info see official documentation

Entities

• Customer: it holds info about the customer including two sensitive data that the client shall not access (sensitiveDataOne, sensitiveDataTwo)

Decoupling Entities

Entities decoupling can be achieved by using projections.
For automating the conversion from entity to view for resource collections annotate the repository with @RepositoryRestResource(excerptProjection = MyView.class)
For single resource retrieval the client must use the provided endpoint to retrieve the projection and not the full entity (this is not true for retrieval of collection of resources).
You may be asking yourself "hold on, so the client can decide if to retrieve the projection or the full entity?!" Yep, that's correct but there is a good reason for it. See here for more

Automatically exposed endpoints:

CRUD

• automatic documentation (to be explored further): curl http://localhost:8081/api/profile
• get all customers (or, if enabled, CustomerView): curl http://localhost:8081/api/customers
• get specific customer: curl http://localhost:8081/api/customers/{id}
• get view (projection) of specific customer: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers/{id}?projection=customer-view'
• update customer: curl -d '{ "firstname": "John"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT http://localhost:8081/api/customers/{id}
• create customer: curl -d '{ "firstname": "Varys", "lastname": "unknown"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:8081/api/customers
• delete customer: curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8081/customers/{id}

Paging

Note: page number is zero-index based

• get all customer specifying page size: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers?size={page_number}'
• get all customer specifying page number: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers?page={page_number}'

Customizaion

Disable a specific out-of-the-box CRUD operation:

Simply in your repository override the method of your choice (explore the JPARepository and the extended interfaces) and annotate it with @RestResource(exported = false) Lunch the app and delete a customer by using its ID (find the curl methods down below). Then uncomment the deleteById override method in the repository, reboot and try again the same operation, you won't be able to delete the customer

Custom endpoints

Search API

Note: page number is zero-index based

• search customers having firstname starting with: curl http://localhost:8081/api/customers/search/firstnameStartsWith?firstname={firstname_param}
• search customers having firstname starting with and get specific page: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers/search/firstnameStartsWith?firstname={firstname_param}&page={page_num}'
• search customers having firstname starting with and get specific page with given page size: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers/search/firstnameStartsWith?firstname={firstname_param}&page={page_num}&size={page_size}'
• search customers having firstname starting with and sort by given field and direction: curl 'http://localhost:8081/api/customers/search/firstnameStartsWith?firstname={firstname_param}&sort={field},{asc/desc}'

Documentation: Application-Level Profile Semantics (ALPS)

An automatically-generated endpoint describing the entities, the endpoints and the operations allowed.
You can access it as follows: curl http://localhost:8081/api/profile
For more information

TODO:

• How to make sure an entity is never exposed to the client but rather always its projection by default?
• How to implement a search feature using Querydsl?
• Is there a way to not expose any endpoints by default?