There are a few variants how you can get started with your repository interface.

The typical approach is to extend CrudRepository, which gives you methods for CRUD functionality. CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete. With version 3.0 we also introduced ListCrudRepository which is very similar to the CrudRepository but for those methods that return multiple entities it returns a List instead of an Iterable which you might find easier to use.

If you are using a reactive store you might choose ReactiveCrudRepository, or RxJava3CrudRepository depending on which reactive framework you are using.

If you are using Kotlin you might pick CoroutineCrudRepository which utilizes Kotlin’s coroutines.

Additional you can extend PagingAndSortingRepository, ReactiveSortingRepository, RxJava3SortingRepository, or CoroutineSortingRepository if you need methods that allow to specify a Sort abstraction or in the first case a Pageable abstraction. Note that the various sorting repositories no longer extended their respective CRUD repository as they did in Spring Data Versions pre 3.0. Therefore, you need to extend both interfaces if you want functionality of both.

If you do not want to extend Spring Data interfaces, you can also annotate your repository interface with @RepositoryDefinition. Extending one of the CRUD repository interfaces exposes a complete set of methods to manipulate your entities. If you prefer to be selective about the methods being exposed, copy the methods you want to expose from the CRUD repository into your domain repository. When doing so, you may change the return type of methods. Spring Data will honor the return type if possible. For example, for methods returning multiple entities you may choose Iterable<T>, List<T>, Collection<T> or a VAVR list.

If many repositories in your application should have the same set of methods you can define your own base interface to inherit from. Such an interface must be annotated with @NoRepositoryBean. This prevents Spring Data to try to create an instance of it directly and failing because it can’t determine the entity for that repository, since it still contains a generic type variable.

The following example shows how to selectively expose CRUD methods (findById and save, in this case):

In the prior example, you defined a common base interface for all your domain repositories and exposed findById(…) as well as save(…).These methods are routed into the base repository implementation of the store of your choice provided by Spring Data (for example, if you use JPA, the implementation is SimpleJpaRepository), because they match the method signatures in CrudRepository. So the UserRepository can now save users, find individual users by ID, and trigger a query to find Users by email address.

Using a unique Spring Data module in your application makes things simple, because all repository interfaces in the defined scope are bound to the Spring Data module. Sometimes, applications require using more than one Spring Data module. In such cases, a repository definition must distinguish between persistence technologies. When it detects multiple repository factories on the class path, Spring Data enters strict repository configuration mode. Strict configuration uses details on the repository or the domain class to decide about Spring Data module binding for a repository definition:

The following example shows a repository that uses module-specific interfaces (JPA in this case):

The following example shows a repository that uses generic interfaces:

The following example shows a repository that uses domain classes with annotations:

The following bad example shows a repository that uses domain classes with mixed annotations:

Repository type details and distinguishing domain class annotations are used for strict repository configuration to identify repository candidates for a particular Spring Data module. Using multiple persistence technology-specific annotations on the same domain type is possible and enables reuse of domain types across multiple persistence technologies. However, Spring Data can then no longer determine a unique module with which to bind the repository.

The last way to distinguish repositories is by scoping repository base packages. Base packages define the starting points for scanning for repository interface definitions, which implies having repository definitions located in the appropriate packages. By default, annotation-driven configuration uses the package of the configuration class. The base package in XML-based configuration is mandatory.

The following example shows annotation-driven configuration of base packages:

The following strategies are available for the repository infrastructure to resolve the query. With XML configuration, you can configure the strategy at the namespace through the query-lookup-strategy attribute. For Java configuration, you can use the queryLookupStrategy attribute of the EnableMongoRepositories annotation. Some strategies may not be supported for particular datastores.

The query builder mechanism built into the Spring Data repository infrastructure is useful for building constraining queries over entities of the repository.

The following example shows how to create a number of queries:

Parsing query method names is divided into subject and predicate. The first part (find…By, exists…By) defines the subject of the query, the second part forms the predicate. The introducing clause (subject) can contain further expressions. Any text between find (or other introducing keywords) and By is considered to be descriptive unless using one of the result-limiting keywords such as a Distinct to set a distinct flag on the query to be created or Top/First to limit query results.

The appendix contains the full list of query method subject keywords and query method predicate keywords including sorting and letter-casing modifiers. However, the first By acts as a delimiter to indicate the start of the actual criteria predicate. At a very basic level, you can define conditions on entity properties and concatenate them with And and Or.

The actual result of parsing the method depends on the persistence store for which you create the query. However, there are some general things to notice:

Property expressions can refer only to a direct property of the managed entity, as shown in the preceding example. At query creation time, you already make sure that the parsed property is a property of the managed domain class. However, you can also define constraints by traversing nested properties. Consider the following method signature:

Assume a Person has an Address with a ZipCode. In that case, the method creates the x.address.zipCode property traversal. The resolution algorithm starts by interpreting the entire part (AddressZipCode) as the property and checks the domain class for a property with that name (uncapitalized). If the algorithm succeeds, it uses that property. If not, the algorithm splits up the source at the camel-case parts from the right side into a head and a tail and tries to find the corresponding property — in our example, AddressZip and Code. If the algorithm finds a property with that head, it takes the tail and continues building the tree down from there, splitting the tail up in the way just described. If the first split does not match, the algorithm moves the split point to the left (Address, ZipCode) and continues.

Although this should work for most cases, it is possible for the algorithm to select the wrong property. Suppose the Person class has an addressZip property as well. The algorithm would match in the first split round already, choose the wrong property, and fail (as the type of addressZip probably has no code property).

To resolve this ambiguity you can use _ inside your method name to manually define traversal points. So our method name would be as follows:

Because we treat the underscore character as a reserved character, we strongly advise following standard Java naming conventions (that is, not using underscores in property names but using camel case instead).

To handle parameters in your query, define method parameters as already seen in the preceding examples. Besides that, the infrastructure recognizes certain specific types like Pageable, Sort and Limit, to apply pagination, sorting and limiting to your queries dynamically. The following example demonstrates these features:

The first method lets you pass an org.springframework.data.domain.Pageable instance to the query method to dynamically add paging to your statically defined query. A Page knows about the total number of elements and pages available. It does so by the infrastructure triggering a count query to calculate the overall number. As this might be expensive (depending on the store used), you can instead return a Slice. A Slice knows only about whether a next Slice is available, which might be sufficient when walking through a larger result set.

Sorting options are handled through the Pageable instance, too. If you need only sorting, add an org.springframework.data.domain.Sort parameter to your method. As you can see, returning a List is also possible. In this case, the additional metadata required to build the actual Page instance is not created (which, in turn, means that the additional count query that would have been necessary is not issued). Rather, it restricts the query to look up only the given range of entities.

You can limit the results of query methods by using the first or top keywords, which you can use interchangeably. You can append an optional numeric value to top or first to specify the maximum result size to be returned. If the number is left out, a result size of 1 is assumed. The following example shows how to limit the query size:

The limiting expressions also support the Distinct keyword for datastores that support distinct queries. Also, for the queries that limit the result set to one instance, wrapping the result into with the Optional keyword is supported.

If pagination or slicing is applied to a limiting query pagination (and the calculation of the number of available pages), it is applied within the limited result.

Query methods that return multiple results can use standard Java Iterable, List, and Set. Beyond that, we support returning Spring Data’s Streamable, a custom extension of Iterable, as well as collection types provided by Vavr. Refer to the appendix explaining all possible query method return types.

You can process the results of query methods incrementally by using a Java 8 Stream<T> as the return type. Instead of wrapping the query results in a Stream, data store-specific methods are used to perform the streaming, as shown in the following example:

As of Spring Data 2.0, repository CRUD methods that return an individual aggregate instance use Java 8’s Optional to indicate the potential absence of a value. Besides that, Spring Data supports returning the following wrapper types on query methods:

Alternatively, query methods can choose not to use a wrapper type at all. The absence of a query result is then indicated by returning null. Repository methods returning collections, collection alternatives, wrappers, and streams are guaranteed never to return null but rather the corresponding empty representation. See “Repository query return types” for details.

You can run repository queries asynchronously by using Spring’s asynchronous method running capability. This means the method returns immediately upon invocation while the actual query occurs in a task that has been submitted to a Spring TaskExecutor. Asynchronous queries differ from reactive queries and should not be mixed. See the store-specific documentation for more details on reactive support. The following example shows a number of asynchronous queries:

Use the store-specific @EnableMongoRepositories annotation on a Java configuration class to define a configuration for repository activation. For an introduction to Java-based configuration of the Spring container, see JavaConfig in the Spring reference documentation.

A sample configuration to enable Spring Data repositories resembles the following:

Each Spring Data module includes a repositories element that lets you define a base package that Spring scans for you, as shown in the following example:

In the preceding example, Spring is instructed to scan com.acme.repositories and all its sub-packages for interfaces extending Repository or one of its sub-interfaces. For each interface found, the infrastructure registers the persistence technology-specific FactoryBean to create the appropriate proxies that handle invocations of the query methods. Each bean is registered under a bean name that is derived from the interface name, so an interface of UserRepository would be registered under userRepository. Bean names for nested repository interfaces are prefixed with their enclosing type name. The base package attribute allows wildcards so that you can define a pattern of scanned packages.

By default, the infrastructure picks up every interface that extends the persistence technology-specific Repository sub-interface located under the configured base package and creates a bean instance for it. However, you might want more fine-grained control over which interfaces have bean instances created for them. To do so, use filter elements inside the repository declaration. The semantics are exactly equivalent to the elements in Spring’s component filters. For details, see the Spring reference documentation for these elements.

For example, to exclude certain interfaces from instantiation as repository beans, you could use the following configuration:

The preceding example excludes all interfaces ending in SomeRepository from being instantiated and includes those ending with SomeOtherRepository.

You can also use the repository infrastructure outside of a Spring container — for example, in CDI environments. You still need some Spring libraries in your classpath, but, generally, you can set up repositories programmatically as well. The Spring Data modules that provide repository support ship with a persistence technology-specific RepositoryFactory that you can use, as follows:

To enrich a repository with custom functionality, you must first define a fragment interface and an implementation for the custom functionality, as follows:

The implementation itself does not depend on Spring Data and can be a regular Spring bean. Consequently, you can use standard dependency injection behavior to inject references to other beans (such as a JdbcTemplate), take part in aspects, and so on.

Then you can let your repository interface extend the fragment interface, as follows:

Extending the fragment interface with your repository interface combines the CRUD and custom functionality and makes it available to clients.

Spring Data repositories are implemented by using fragments that form a repository composition. Fragments are the base repository, functional aspects (such as QueryDsl), and custom interfaces along with their implementations. Each time you add an interface to your repository interface, you enhance the composition by adding a fragment. The base repository and repository aspect implementations are provided by each Spring Data module.

The following example shows custom interfaces and their implementations:

The following example shows the interface for a custom repository that extends CrudRepository:

Repositories may be composed of multiple custom implementations that are imported in the order of their declaration. Custom implementations have a higher priority than the base implementation and repository aspects. This ordering lets you override base repository and aspect methods and resolves ambiguity if two fragments contribute the same method signature. Repository fragments are not limited to use in a single repository interface. Multiple repositories may use a fragment interface, letting you reuse customizations across different repositories.

The following example shows a repository fragment and its implementation:

The following example shows a repository that uses the preceding repository fragment:

The approach described in the preceding section requires customization of each repository interfaces when you want to customize the base repository behavior so that all repositories are affected. To instead change behavior for all repositories, you can create an implementation that extends the persistence technology-specific repository base class. This class then acts as a custom base class for the repository proxies, as shown in the following example:

The final step is to make the Spring Data infrastructure aware of the customized repository base class. In configuration, you can do so by using the repositoryBaseClass, as shown in the following example:

Querydsl is a framework that enables the construction of statically typed SQL-like queries through its fluent API.

Several Spring Data modules offer integration with Querydsl through QuerydslPredicateExecutor, as the following example shows:

To use the Querydsl support, extend QuerydslPredicateExecutor on your repository interface, as the following example shows:

The preceding example lets you write type-safe queries by using Querydsl Predicate instances, as the following example shows:

Spring Data modules that support the repository programming model ship with a variety of web support. The web related components require Spring MVC JARs to be on the classpath. Some of them even provide integration with Spring HATEOAS. In general, the integration support is enabled by using the @EnableSpringDataWebSupport annotation in your JavaConfig configuration class, as the following example shows:

The @EnableSpringDataWebSupport annotation registers a few components. We discuss those later in this section. It also detects Spring HATEOAS on the classpath and registers integration components (if present) for it as well.

If you work with the Spring JDBC module, you are probably familiar with the support for populating a DataSource with SQL scripts. A similar abstraction is available on the repositories level, although it does not use SQL as the data definition language because it must be store-independent. Thus, the populators support XML (through Spring’s OXM abstraction) and JSON (through Jackson) to define data with which to populate the repositories.

Assume you have a file called data.json with the following content:

You can populate your repositories by using the populator elements of the repository namespace provided in Spring Data Commons. To populate the preceding data to your PersonRepository, declare a populator similar to the following:

The preceding declaration causes the data.json file to be read and deserialized by a Jackson ObjectMapper.

The type to which the JSON object is unmarshalled is determined by inspecting the _class attribute of the JSON document. The infrastructure eventually selects the appropriate repository to handle the object that was deserialized.

To instead use XML to define the data the repositories should be populated with, you can use the unmarshaller-populator element. You configure it to use one of the XML marshaller options available in Spring OXM. See the Spring reference documentation for details. The following example shows how to unmarshall a repository populator with JAXB:

The following example shows an example of using Java-based bean metadata to register an instance of a com.mongodb.client.MongoClient:

This approach lets you use the standard com.mongodb.client.MongoClient instance, with the container using Spring’s MongoClientFactoryBean. As compared to instantiating a com.mongodb.client.MongoClient instance directly, the FactoryBean has the added advantage of also providing the container with an ExceptionTranslator implementation that translates MongoDB exceptions to exceptions in Spring’s portable DataAccessException hierarchy for data access classes annotated with the @Repository annotation. This hierarchy and the use of @Repository is described in Spring’s DAO support features.

The following example shows an example of a Java-based bean metadata that supports exception translation on @Repository annotated classes:

To access the com.mongodb.client.MongoClient object created by the MongoClientFactoryBean in other @Configuration classes or your own classes, use a private @Autowired MongoClient mongoClient; field.

While you can use Spring’s traditional <beans/> XML namespace to register an instance of com.mongodb.client.MongoClient with the container, the XML can be quite verbose, as it is general-purpose. XML namespaces are a better alternative to configuring commonly used objects, such as the Mongo instance. The mongo namespace lets you create a Mongo instance server location, replica-sets, and options.

To use the Mongo namespace elements, you need to reference the Mongo schema, as follows:

The following example shows a more advanced configuration with MongoClientSettings (note that these are not recommended values):

The following example shows a configuration using replica sets:

While com.mongodb.client.MongoClient is the entry point to the MongoDB driver API, connecting to a specific MongoDB database instance requires additional information, such as the database name and an optional username and password. With that information, you can obtain a com.mongodb.client.MongoDatabase object and access all the functionality of a specific MongoDB database instance. Spring provides the org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.MongoDatabaseFactory interface, shown in the following listing, to bootstrap connectivity to the database:

The following sections show how you can use the container with either Java-based or XML-based metadata to configure an instance of the MongoDatabaseFactory interface. In turn, you can use the MongoDatabaseFactory instance to configure MongoTemplate.

Instead of using the IoC container to create an instance of MongoTemplate, you can use them in standard Java code, as follows:

The code in bold highlights the use of SimpleMongoClientDbFactory and is the only difference between the listing shown in the getting started section.

To register a MongoDatabaseFactory instance with the container, you write code much like what was highlighted in the previous code listing. The following listing shows a simple example:

MongoDB Server generation 3 changed the authentication model when connecting to the DB. Therefore, some of the configuration options available for authentication are no longer valid. You should use the MongoClient-specific options for setting credentials through MongoCredential to provide authentication data, as shown in the following example:

If you need to configure additional options on the com.mongodb.client.MongoClient instance that is used to create a SimpleMongoClientDbFactory, you can refer to an existing bean as shown in the following example. To show another common usage pattern, the following listing shows the use of a property placeholder, which lets you parametrize the configuration and the creation of a MongoTemplate:

You can use the following configuration to create and register an instance of MongoTemplate, as the following example shows:

There are several overloaded constructors of MongoTemplate:

Other optional properties that you might like to set when creating a MongoTemplate are the default WriteResultCheckingPolicy, WriteConcern, and ReadPreference properties.

When in development, it is handy to either log or throw an exception if the com.mongodb.WriteResult returned from any MongoDB operation contains an error. It is quite common to forget to do this during development and then end up with an application that looks like it runs successfully when, in fact, the database was not modified according to your expectations. You can set the WriteResultChecking property of MongoTemplate to one of the following values: EXCEPTION or NONE, to either throw an Exception or do nothing, respectively. The default is to use a WriteResultChecking value of NONE.

If it has not yet been specified through the driver at a higher level (such as com.mongodb.client.MongoClient), you can set the com.mongodb.WriteConcern property that the MongoTemplate uses for write operations. If the WriteConcern property is not set, it defaults to the one set in the MongoDB driver’s DB or Collection setting.

For more advanced cases where you want to set different WriteConcern values on a per-operation basis (for remove, update, insert, and save operations), a strategy interface called WriteConcernResolver can be configured on MongoTemplate. Since MongoTemplate is used to persist POJOs, the WriteConcernResolver lets you create a policy that can map a specific POJO class to a WriteConcern value. The following listing shows the WriteConcernResolver interface:

You can use the MongoAction argument to determine the WriteConcern value or use the value of the Template itself as a default. MongoAction contains the collection name being written to, the java.lang.Class of the POJO, the converted Document, the operation (REMOVE, UPDATE, INSERT, INSERT_LIST, or SAVE), and a few other pieces of contextual information. The following example shows two sets of classes getting different WriteConcern settings:

MongoDB requires that you have an _id field for all documents. If you do not provide one, the driver assigns an ObjectId with a generated value. When you use the MappingMongoConverter, certain rules govern how properties from the Java class are mapped to this _id field:

The following outlines what type conversion, if any, is done on the property mapped to the _id document field when using the MappingMongoConverter (the default for MongoTemplate).

If no field or property specified in the previous sets of rules is present in the Java class, an implicit _id file is generated by the driver but not mapped to a property or field of the Java class.

When querying and updating, MongoTemplate uses the converter that corresponds to the preceding rules for saving documents so that field names and types used in your queries can match what is in your domain classes.

Some environments require a customized approach to map Id values such as data stored in MongoDB that did not run through the Spring Data mapping layer. Documents can contain _id values that can be represented either as ObjectId or as String. Reading documents from the store back to the domain type works just fine. Querying for documents via their id can be cumbersome due to the implicit ObjectId conversion. Therefore documents cannot be retrieved that way. For those cases @MongoId provides more control over the actual id mapping attempts.

MongoDB collections can contain documents that represent instances of a variety of types.This feature can be useful if you store a hierarchy of classes or have a class with a property of type Object.In the latter case, the values held inside that property have to be read in correctly when retrieving the object.Thus, we need a mechanism to store type information alongside the actual document.

To achieve that, the MappingMongoConverter uses a MongoTypeMapper abstraction with DefaultMongoTypeMapper as its main implementation.Its default behavior to store the fully qualified classname under _class inside the document.Type hints are written for top-level documents as well as for every value (if it is a complex type and a subtype of the declared property type).The following example (with a JSON representation at the end) shows how the mapping works:

Spring Data MongoDB stores the type information as the last field for the actual root class as well as for the nested type (because it is complex and a subtype of Contact).So, if you now use mongoTemplate.findAll(Object.class, "sample"), you can find out that the document stored is a Sample instance.You can also find out that the value property is actually a Person.

There are several convenient methods on MongoTemplate for saving and inserting your objects. To have more fine-grained control over the conversion process, you can register Spring converters with the MappingMongoConverter — for example Converter<Person, Document> and Converter<Document, Person>.

The simple case of using the save operation is to save a POJO. In this case, the collection name is determined by name (not fully qualified) of the class. You may also call the save operation with a specific collection name. You can use mapping metadata to override the collection in which to store the object.

When inserting or saving, if the Id property is not set, the assumption is that its value will be auto-generated by the database. Consequently, for auto-generation of an ObjectId to succeed, the type of the Id property or field in your class must be a String, an ObjectId, or a BigInteger.

The following example shows how to save a document and retrieving its contents:

The following insert and save operations are available:

A similar set of insert operations is also available:

For updates, you can update the first document found by using MongoOperation.updateFirst or you can update all documents that were found to match the query by using the MongoOperation.updateMulti method. The following example shows an update of all SAVINGS accounts where we are adding a one-time $50.00 bonus to the balance by using the $inc operator:

In addition to the Query discussed earlier, we provide the update definition by using an Update object. The Update class has methods that match the update modifiers available for MongoDB.

Most methods return the Update object to provide a fluent style for the API.

Related to performing an updateFirst operation, you can also perform an “upsert” operation, which will perform an insert if no document is found that matches the query. The document that is inserted is a combination of the query document and the update document. The following example shows how to use the upsert method:

The findAndModify(…) method on MongoCollection can update a document and return either the old or newly updated document in a single operation. MongoTemplate provides four findAndModify overloaded methods that take Query and Update classes and converts from Document to your POJOs:

The following example inserts a few Person objects into the container and performs a findAndUpdate operation:

The FindAndModifyOptions method lets you set the options of returnNew, upsert, and remove.An example extending from the previous code snippet follows:

Update methods exposed by MongoOperations and ReactiveMongoOperations also accept an Aggregation Pipeline via AggregationUpdate. Using AggregationUpdate allows leveraging MongoDB 4.2 aggregations in an update operation. Using aggregations in an update allows updating one or more fields by expressing multiple stages and multiple conditions with a single operation.

The update can consist of the following stages:

The most straight forward method of replacing an entire Document is via its id using the save method. However this might not always be feasible. findAndReplace offers an alternative that allows to identify the document to replace via a simple query.

You can use one of five overloaded methods to remove an object from the database:

The @Version annotation provides syntax similar to that of JPA in the context of MongoDB and makes sure updates are only applied to documents with a matching version. Therefore, the actual value of the version property is added to the update query in such a way that the update does not have any effect if another operation altered the document in the meantime. In that case, an OptimisticLockingFailureException is thrown. The following example shows these features:

Earlier, we saw how to retrieve a single document by using the findOne and findById methods on MongoTemplate. These methods return a single domain object. We can also query for a collection of documents to be returned as a list of domain objects. Assuming that we have a number of Person objects with name and age stored as documents in a collection and that each person has an embedded account document with a balance, we can now run a query using the following code:

All find methods take a Query object as a parameter. This object defines the criteria and options used to perform the query. The criteria are specified by using a Criteria object that has a static factory method named where to instantiate a new Criteria object. We recommend using static imports for org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.query.Criteria.where and Query.query to make the query more readable.

The query should return a list of Person objects that meet the specified criteria. The rest of this section lists the methods of the Criteria and Query classes that correspond to the operators provided in MongoDB. Most methods return the Criteria object, to provide a fluent style for the API.

The query methods need to specify the target type T that is returned, and they are overloaded with an explicit collection name for queries that should operate on a collection other than the one indicated by the return type. The following query methods let you find one or more documents:

MongoDB provides an operation to obtain distinct values for a single field by using a query from the resulting documents. Resulting values are not required to have the same data type, nor is the feature limited to simple types. For retrieval, the actual result type does matter for the sake of conversion and typing. The following example shows how to query for distinct values:

Retrieving distinct values into a Collection of Object is the most flexible way, as it tries to determine the property value of the domain type and convert results to the desired type or mapping Document structures.

Sometimes, when all values of the desired field are fixed to a certain type, it is more convenient to directly obtain a correctly typed Collection, as shown in the following example:

MongoDB supports GeoSpatial queries through the use of operators such as $near, $within, geoWithin, and $nearSphere. Methods specific to geospatial queries are available on the Criteria class. There are also a few shape classes (Box, Circle, and Point) that are used in conjunction with geospatial related Criteria methods.

To understand how to perform GeoSpatial queries, consider the following Venue class (taken from the integration tests and relying on the rich MappingMongoConverter):

To find locations within a Circle, you can use the following query:

To find venues within a Circle using spherical coordinates, you can use the following query:

To find venues within a Box, you can use the following query:

To find venues near a Point, you can use the following queries:

To find venues near a Point using spherical coordinates, you can use the following query:

MongoDB supports GeoJSON and simple (legacy) coordinate pairs for geospatial data. Those formats can both be used for storing as well as querying data. See the MongoDB manual on GeoJSON support to learn about requirements and restrictions.

Since version 2.6 of MongoDB, you can run full-text queries by using the $text operator. Methods and operations specific to full-text queries are available in TextQuery and TextCriteria. When doing full text search, see the MongoDB reference for its behavior and limitations.

Since version 3.4, MongoDB supports collations for collection and index creation and various query operations. Collations define string comparison rules based on the ICU collations. A collation document consists of various properties that are encapsulated in Collation, as the following listing shows:

Collations can be used to create collections and indexes. If you create a collection that specifies a collation, the collation is applied to index creation and queries unless you specify a different collation. A collation is valid for a whole operation and cannot be specified on a per-field basis.

Like other metadata, collations can be be derived from the domain type via the collation attribute of the @Document annotation and will be applied directly when running queries, creating collections or indexes.

Using collations with collection operations is a matter of specifying a Collation instance in your query or operation options, as the following two examples show:

MongoDB Repositories support Collations via the collation attribute of the @Query annotation.

To streamline usage of collation attributes throughout the codebase it is also possible to use the @Collation annotation, which serves as a meta annotation for the ones mentioned above. The same rules and locations apply, plus, direct usage of @Collation supersedes any collation values defined on @Query and other annotations. Which means, if a collation is declared via @Query and additionally via @Collation, then the one from @Collation is picked.

The MongoOperations interface is one of the central components when it comes to more low-level interaction with MongoDB. It offers a wide range of methods covering needs from collection creation, index creation, and CRUD operations to more advanced functionality, such as Map-Reduce and aggregations. You can find multiple overloads for each method. Most of them cover optional or nullable parts of the API.

FluentMongoOperations provides a more narrow interface for the common methods of MongoOperations and provides a more readable, fluent API. The entry points (insert(…), find(…), update(…), and others) follow a natural naming schema based on the operation to be run. Moving on from the entry point, the API is designed to offer only context-dependent methods that lead to a terminating method that invokes the actual MongoOperations counterpart — the all method in the case of the following example:

Sometimes, a collection in MongoDB holds entities of different types, such as a Jedi within a collection of SWCharacters. To use different types for Query and return value mapping, you can use as(Class<?> targetType) to map results differently, as the following example shows:

You can switch between retrieving a single entity and retrieving multiple entities as a List or a Stream through the terminating methods: first(), one(), all(), or stream().

When writing a geo-spatial query with near(NearQuery), the number of terminating methods is altered to include only the methods that are valid for running a geoNear command in MongoDB (fetching entities as a GeoResult within GeoResults), as the following example shows:

Kotlin embraces domain-specific language creation through its language syntax and its extension system. Spring Data MongoDB ships with a Kotlin Extension for Criteria using Kotlin property references to build type-safe queries. Queries using this extension are typically benefit from improved readability. Most keywords on Criteria have a matching Kotlin extension, such as inValues and regex.

Consider the following example explaining Type-safe Queries:

MongoDB offers various ways of applying meta information, like a comment or a batch size, to a query.Using the Query API directly there are several methods for those options.

On the repository level the @Meta annotation provides means to add query options in a declarative way.

This chapter provides an introduction to Query by Example and explains how to use it.

Query by Example (QBE) is a user-friendly querying technique with a simple interface. It allows dynamic query creation and does not require you to write queries that contain field names. In fact, Query by Example does not require you to write queries by using store-specific query languages at all.

The Query by Example API consists of four parts:

Query by Example is well suited for several use cases:

Query by Example also has several limitations:

Before getting started with Query by Example, you need to have a domain object. To get started, create an interface for your repository, as shown in the following example:

The preceding example shows a simple domain object. You can use it to create an Example. By default, fields having null values are ignored, and strings are matched by using the store specific defaults.

Examples can be built by either using the of factory method or by using ExampleMatcher. Example is immutable. The following listing shows a simple Example:

You can run the example queries by using repositories. To do so, let your repository interface extend QueryByExampleExecutor<T>. The following listing shows an excerpt from the QueryByExampleExecutor interface:

Examples are not limited to default settings. You can specify your own defaults for string matching, null handling, and property-specific settings by using the ExampleMatcher, as shown in the following example:

By default, the ExampleMatcher expects all values set on the probe to match. If you want to get results matching any of the predicates defined implicitly, use ExampleMatcher.matchingAny().

You can specify behavior for individual properties (such as "firstname" and "lastname" or, for nested properties, "address.city"). You can tune it with matching options and case sensitivity, as shown in the following example:

Another way to configure matcher options is to use lambdas (introduced in Java 8). This approach creates a callback that asks the implementor to modify the matcher. You need not return the matcher, because configuration options are held within the matcher instance. The following example shows a matcher that uses lambdas:

Queries created by Example use a merged view of the configuration. Default matching settings can be set at the ExampleMatcher level, while individual settings can be applied to particular property paths. Settings that are set on ExampleMatcher are inherited by property path settings unless they are defined explicitly. Settings on a property patch have higher precedence than default settings. The following table describes the scope of the various ExampleMatcher settings:

QueryByExampleExecutor offers one more method, which we did not mention so far: <S extends T, R> R findBy(Example<S> example, Function<FluentQuery.FetchableFluentQuery<S>, R> queryFunction). As with other methods, it executes a query derived from an Example. However, with the second argument, you can control aspects of that execution that you cannot dynamically control otherwise. You do so by invoking the various methods of the FetchableFluentQuery in the second argument. sortBy lets you specify an ordering for your result. as lets you specify the type to which you want the result to be transformed. project limits the queried attributes. first, firstValue, one, oneValue, all, page, stream, count, and exists define what kind of result you get and how the query behaves when more than the expected number of results are available.

The following example shows how to query by example when using a repository (of Person objects, in this case):

An Example containing an untyped ExampleSpec uses the Repository type and its collection name. Typed ExampleSpec instances use their type as the result type and the collection name from the Repository instance.

Spring Data MongoDB provides support for the following matching options:

By default Example is strictly typed. This means that the mapped query has an included type match, restricting it to probe assignable types. For example, when sticking with the default type key (_class), the query has restrictions such as (_class : { $in : [ com.acme.Person] }).

By using the UntypedExampleMatcher, it is possible to bypass the default behavior and skip the type restriction. So, as long as field names match, nearly any domain type can be used as the probe for creating the reference, as the following example shows:

To understand how to perform Map-Reduce operations, we use an example from the book, MongoDB - The Definitive Guide ^[1].In this example, we create three documents that have the values [a,b], [b,c], and [c,d], respectively.The values in each document are associated with the key, 'x', as the following example shows (assume these documents are in a collection named jmr1):

The following map function counts the occurrence of each letter in the array for each document:

The follwing reduce function sums up the occurrence of each letter across all the documents:

Running the preceding functions result in the following collection:

Assuming that the map and reduce functions are located in map.js and reduce.js and bundled in your jar so they are available on the classpath, you can run a Map-Reduce operation as follows:

The preceding exmaple produces the following output:

The MapReduceResults class implements Iterable and provides access to the raw output and timing and count statistics.The following listing shows the ValueObject class:

By default, the output type of INLINE is used so that you need not specify an output collection.To specify additional Map-Reduce options, use an overloaded method that takes an additional MapReduceOptions argument.The class MapReduceOptions has a fluent API, so adding additional options can be done in a compact syntax.The following example sets the output collection to jmr1_out (note that setting only the output collection assumes a default output type of REPLACE):

There is also a static import (import static org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.mapreduce.MapReduceOptions.options;) that can be used to make the syntax slightly more compact, as the following example shows:

You can also specify a query to reduce the set of data that is fed into the Map-Reduce operation.The following example removes the document that contains [a,b] from consideration for Map-Reduce operations:

Note that you can specify additional limit and sort values on the query, but you cannot skip values.

In order to understand how group operations work the following example is used, which is somewhat artificial. For a more realistic example consult the book 'MongoDB - The definitive guide'. A collection named group_test_collection created with the following rows.

We would like to group by the only field in each row, the x field and aggregate the number of times each specific value of x occurs. To do this we need to create an initial document that contains our count variable and also a reduce function which will increment it each time it is encountered. The Java code to run the group operation is shown below

The first argument is the name of the collection to run the group operation over, the second is a fluent API that specifies properties of the group operation via a GroupBy class. In this example we are using just the intialDocument and reduceFunction methods. You can also specify a key-function, as well as a finalizer as part of the fluent API. If you have multiple keys to group by, you can pass in a comma separated list of keys.

The raw results of the group operation is a JSON document that looks like this

The document under the "retval" field is mapped onto the third argument in the group method, in this case XObject which is shown below.

You can also obtain the raw result as a Document by calling the method getRawResults on the GroupByResults class.

There is an additional method overload of the group method on MongoOperations which lets you specify a Criteria object for selecting a subset of the rows. An example which uses a Criteria object, with some syntax sugar using static imports, as well as referencing a key-function and reduce function javascript files via a Spring Resource string is shown below.

The Aggregation Framework support in Spring Data MongoDB is based on the following key abstractions: Aggregation, AggregationDefinition, and AggregationResults.

Note that, if you provide an input class as the first parameter to the newAggregation method, the MongoTemplate derives the name of the input collection from this class. Otherwise, if you do not not specify an input class, you must provide the name of the input collection explicitly. If both an input class and an input collection are provided, the latter takes precedence.

The MongoDB Aggregation Framework provides the following types of aggregation stages and operations: