Upgrading from 3.2.x to 4.0.x

This section describes breaking changes from version 3.2.x to 4.0.x and how removed features can be replaced by new introduced features.

Removal of the used Jackson Mapper

One of the changes in version 4.0.x is that Spring Data Elasticsearch does not use the Jackson Mapper anymore to map an entity to the JSON representation needed for Elasticsearch (see Elasticsearch Object Mapping). In version 3.2.x the Jackson Mapper was the default that was used. It was possible to switch to the meta-model based converter (named ElasticsearchEntityMapper) by explicitly configuring it (Meta Model Object Mapping).

In version 4.0.x the meta-model based converter is the only one that is available and does not need to be configured explicitly. If you had a custom configuration to enable the meta-model converter by providing a bean like this:

@Bean
@Override
public EntityMapper entityMapper() {

  ElasticsearchEntityMapper entityMapper = new ElasticsearchEntityMapper(
    elasticsearchMappingContext(), new DefaultConversionService()
  );
  entityMapper.setConversions(elasticsearchCustomConversions());

  return entityMapper;
}

You now have to remove this bean, the ElasticsearchEntityMapper interface has been removed.

Entity configuration

Some users had custom Jackson annotations on the entity class, for example in order to define a custom name for the mapped document in Elasticsearch or to configure date conversions. These are not taken into account anymore. The needed functionality is now provided with Spring Data Elasticsearch’s @Field annotation. Please see Mapping Annotation Overview for detailed information.

Removal of implicit index name from query objects

In 3.2.x the different query classes like IndexQuery or SearchQuery had properties that were taking the index name or index names that they were operating upon.If these were not set, the passed in entity was inspected to retrieve the index name that was set in the @Document annotation.
In 4.0.x the index name(s) must now be provided in an additional parameter of type IndexCoordinates.By separating this, it now is possible to use one query object against different indices.

So for example the following code:

IndexQuery indexQuery = new IndexQueryBuilder()
  .withId(person.getId().toString())
  .withObject(person)
  .build();

String documentId = elasticsearchOperations.index(indexQuery);

must be changed to:

IndexCoordinates indexCoordinates = elasticsearchOperations.getIndexCoordinatesFor(person.getClass());

IndexQuery indexQuery = new IndexQueryBuilder()
  .withId(person.getId().toString())
  .withObject(person)
  .build();

String documentId = elasticsearchOperations.index(indexQuery, indexCoordinates);

To make it easier to work with entities and use the index name that is contained in the entitie’s @Document annotation, new methods have been added like DocumentOperations.save(T entity);

The new Operations interfaces

In version 3.2 there was the ElasticsearchOperations interface that defined all the methods for the ElasticsearchTemplate class. In version 4 the functions have been split into different interfaces, aligning these interfaces with the Elasticsearch API:

  • DocumentOperations are the functions related documents like saving, or deleting

  • SearchOperations contains the functions to search in Elasticsearch

  • IndexOperations define the functions to operate on indexes, like index creation or mappings creation.

ElasticsearchOperations now extends DocumentOperations and SearchOperations and has methods get access to an IndexOperations instance.

All the functions from the ElasticsearchOperations interface in version 3.2 that are now moved to the IndexOperations interface are still available, they are marked as deprecated and have default implementations that delegate to the new implementation: 
/**
 * Create an index for given indexName.
 *
 * @param indexName the name of the index
 * @return {@literal true} if the index was created
 * @deprecated since 4.0, use {@link IndexOperations#create()}
 */
@Deprecated
default boolean createIndex(String indexName) {
	return indexOps(IndexCoordinates.of(indexName)).create();
}

Deprecations

Methods and classes

Many functions and classes have been deprecated. These functions still work, but the Javadocs show with what they should be replaced.

Example from ElasticsearchOperations
/*
 * Retrieves an object from an index.
 *
 * @param query the query defining the id of the object to get
 * @param clazz the type of the object to be returned
 * @return the found object
 * @deprecated since 4.0, use {@link #get(String, Class, IndexCoordinates)}
 */
@Deprecated
@Nullable
<T> T queryForObject(GetQuery query, Class<T> clazz);

Elasticsearch deprecations

Since version 7 the Elasticsearch TransportClient is deprecated, it will be removed with Elasticsearch version 8. Spring Data Elasticsearch deprecates the ElasticsearchTemplate class which uses the TransportClient in version 4.0.

Mapping types were removed from Elasticsearch 7, they still exist as deprecated values in the Spring Data @Document annotation and the IndexCoordinates class but they are not used anymore internally.

Removals

  • As already described, the ElasticsearchEntityMapper interface has been removed.

  • The SearchQuery interface has been merged into it’s base interface Query, so it’s occurrences can just be replaced with Query.

  • The method org.springframework.data.elasticsearch.core.ElasticsearchOperations.query(SearchQuery query, ResultsExtractor<T> resultsExtractor); and the org.springframework.data.elasticsearch.core.ResultsExtractor interface have been removed. These could be used to parse the result from Elasticsearch for cases in which the response mapping done with the Jackson based mapper was not enough. Since version 4.0, there are the new Search Result Types to return the information from an Elasticsearch response, so there is no need to expose this low level functionality.

  • The low level methods startScroll, continueScroll and clearScroll have been removed from the ElasticsearchOperations interface. For low level scroll API access, there now are searchScrollStart, searchScrollContinue and searchScrollClear methods on the ElasticsearchRestTemplate class.