Multiple Repositories for the Same Entity in Spring Data Rest Multiple Repositories for the Same Entity in Spring Data Rest spring spring

Multiple Repositories for the Same Entity in Spring Data Rest


The terrible part is not only that you can only have 1 spring data rest repository (@RepositoryRestResource) per Entity but also that if you have a regular JPA @Repository (like CrudRepository or PagingAndSorting) it will also interact with the spring data rest one (as the key in the map is the Entity itself).Lost quite a few hours debugging random load of one or the other. I guess that if this is a hard limitation of spring data rest at least an Exception could be thrown if the key of the map is already there when trying to override the value.


The answer seems to be: There is only one repository possible per entity.


I ended up using the @Subselect to create a second immutable entity and bound that to the second JpaRepsotory and setting it to @RestResource(exported = false), that also encourages a separation of concerns.

Employee Example

@Entity@Table(name = "employee")public class Employee {    @Id    Long id    String name    ...}
@RestResourcepublic interface EmployeeRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Employee, Long> {}
@Entity@Immutable   @Subselect(value = 'select id, name, salary from employee')public class VEmployeeSummary {    @Id    Long id    ...}
@RestResource(exported = false)public interface VEmployeeRepository extends JpaRepository<VEmployeeSummary, Long> {}

Context

Two packages in the monolithic application had different requirements. One needed to expose the entities for the UI in a PagingAndSortingRepository including CRUD functions. The other was for an aggregating backend report component without paging but with sorting.

I know I could have filtered the results from the PagingAndSorting Repository after requesting Pageable.unpaged() but I just wanted a Basic JPA repository which returned List for some filters.