Typically, your repository interface extends Repository, CrudRepository, or PagingAndSortingRepository. Alternatively, if you do not want to extend Spring Data interfaces, you can also annotate your repository interface with @RepositoryDefinition. Extending CrudRepository 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 CrudRepository into your domain repository.

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 Enable${store}Repositories annotation. Some strategies may not be supported for particular datastores.

The query builder mechanism built into Spring Data repository infrastructure is useful for building constraining queries over entities of the repository. The mechanism strips the prefixes find…By, read…By, query…By, count…By, and get…By from the method and starts parsing the rest of it. The introducing clause can contain further expressions, such as a Distinct to set a distinct flag on the query to be created. However, the first By acts as delimiter to indicate the start of the actual criteria. At a very basic level, you can define conditions on entity properties and concatenate them with And and Or. The following example shows how to create a number of queries:

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 property traversal x.address.zipCode. 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 and Sort, to apply pagination and sorting 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 only knows 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 only need 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.

The results of query methods can be limited by using the first or top keywords, which can be used interchangeably. An optional numeric value can be appended 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. Also, for the queries limiting 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 pages available), it is applied within the limited result.

Query methods that return multiple results can use standard Java Iterable, List, Set. Beyond that we support returning Spring Data’s Streamable, a custom extension of Iterable, as well as collection types provided by Vavr.

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.

The results of query methods can be processed incrementally by using a Java 8 Stream<T> as 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:

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

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. The base-package attribute allows wildcards so that you can define a pattern of scanned packages.

The repository infrastructure can also be triggered by using a store-specific @Enable${store}Repositories annotation on a JavaConfig class. For an introduction into 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:

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 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 shown in the following example:

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 shown in the following example:

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 implementation. 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 Java configuration, you can do so by using the repositoryBaseClass attribute of the @Enable${store}Repositories annotation, as shown in the following example:

A corresponding attribute is available in the XML namespace, 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 shown in the following example:

To make use of Querydsl support, extend QuerydslPredicateExecutor on your repository interface, as shown in the following example

The preceding example lets you write typesafe queries using Querydsl Predicate instances, as shown in the following example:

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 shown in the following example:

The @EnableSpringDataWebSupport annotation registers a few components we will discuss in a bit. It will also detect Spring HATEOAS on the classpath and register integration components for it as well if present.

Alternatively, if you use XML configuration, register either SpringDataWebConfiguration or HateoasAwareSpringDataWebConfiguration as Spring beans, as shown in the following example (for SpringDataWebConfiguration):

If you work with the Spring JDBC module, you are probably familiar with the support to populate 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 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 unmarshal a repository populator with JAXB:

The following example shows an example of using Java-based bean metadata to register an instance of io.r2dbc.spi.ConnectionFactory:

This approach lets you use the standard io.r2dbc.spi.ConnectionFactory instance, with the container using Spring’s AbstractR2dbcConfiguration. As compared to registering a ConnectionFactory instance directly, the configuration support has the added advantage of also providing the container with an ExceptionTranslator implementation that translates R2DBC 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.

AbstractR2dbcConfiguration also registers DatabaseClient, which is required for database interaction and for Repository implementation.

Spring Data R2DBC supports drivers through R2DBC’s pluggable SPI mechanism. You can use any driver that implements the R2DBC spec with Spring Data R2DBC. R2DBC is a relatively young initiative that gains significance by maturing through adoption. As of this writing, the following drivers are available:

Spring Data R2DBC reacts to database specifics by inspecting the ConnectionFactory and selects the appropriate database dialect accordingly. You can configure your own R2dbcDialect if the driver you use is not yet known to Spring Data R2DBC.

The simplest way to create a DatabaseClient object is through a static factory method, as follows:

The preceding method creates a DatabaseClient with default settings.

You can also obtain a Builder instance from DatabaseClient.builder(). You can customize the client by calling the following methods:

Once built, a DatabaseClient instance is immutable. However, you can clone it and build a modified copy without affecting the original instance, as the following example shows:

Spring Data R2DBC obtains a connection to the database through a ConnectionFactory. A ConnectionFactory is part of the R2DBC specification and is a generalized connection factory. It lets a container or a framework hide connection pooling and transaction management issues from the application code.

When you use Spring Data R2DBC, you can create a ConnectionFactory by using your R2DBC driver. ConnectionFactory implementations can either return the same connection or different connections or provide connection pooling. DatabaseClient uses ConnectionFactory to create and release connections for each operation without affinity to a particular connection across multiple operations.

Assuming you use H2 as a database, a typical programmatic setup looks something like the following listing:

SQL queries can return values or the number of affected rows. DatabaseClient can return the number of updated rows or the rows themselves, depending on the issued query.

The following example shows an UPDATE statement that returns the number of updated rows:

Running a SELECT query returns a different type of result, in particular tabular results. Tabular data is typically consumed by streaming each Row. You might have noticed the use of fetch() in the previous example. fetch() is a continuation operator that lets you specify how much data you want to consume.

Calling first() returns the first row from the result and discards remaining rows. You can consume data with the following operators:

By default, DatabaseClient queries return their results as Map of column name to value. You can customize type mapping by applying an as(Class<T>) operator, as follows:

as(…) applies Convention-based Object Mapping and maps the resulting columns to your POJO.

You can customize result extraction beyond Map and POJO result extraction by providing an extractor BiFunction<Row, RowMetadata, T>. The extractor function interacts directly with R2DBC’s Row and RowMetadata objects and can return arbitrary values (singular values, collections and maps, and objects).

The following example extracts the id column and emits its value:

A typical application requires parameterized SQL statements to select or update rows according to some input. These are typically SELECT statements constrained by a WHERE clause or INSERT and UPDATE statements that accept input parameters. Parameterized statements bear the risk of SQL injection if parameters are not escaped properly. DatabaseClient leverages R2DBC’s bind API to eliminate the risk of SQL injection for query parameters. You can provide a parameterized SQL statement with the execute(…) operator and bind parameters to the actual Statement. Your R2DBC driver then executes the statement by using prepared statements and parameter substitution.

Parameter binding supports two binding strategies:

The following example shows parameter binding for a query:

The query-preprocessor unrolls named Collection parameters into a series of bind markers to remove the need of dynamic query creation based on the number of arguments. Nested object arrays are expanded to allow usage of (for example) select lists.

Consider the following query:

The preceding query can be parametrized and executed as follows:

The following example shows a simpler variant using IN predicates:

You can use the select() entry point to express your SELECT queries. The resulting SELECT queries support the commonly used clauses (WHERE and ORDER BY) and support pagination. The fluent API style let you chain together multiple methods while having easy-to-understand code. To improve readability, you can use static imports that let you avoid using the 'new' keyword for creating Criteria instances.

You can use the insert() entry point to insert data. Similar to select(), insert() allows free-form and mapped object inserts.

Consider the following simple typed insert operation:

Inserts also support untyped operations, as the following example shows:

You can use the update() entry point to update rows. Updating data starts by specifying the table to update by accepting Update specifying assignments. It also accepts Criteria to create a WHERE clause.

Consider the following simple typed update operation:

Update also supports untyped operations, as the following example shows:

You can use the delete() entry point to delete rows. Removing data starts with a specification of the table to delete from and, optionally, accepts a Criteria to create a WHERE clause.

Consider the following simple insert operation:

The previous sections describe how to declare queries to access a given entity or collection of entities. You can add custom modifying behavior by using the facilities described in Custom Implementations for Spring Data Repositories. As this approach is feasible for comprehensive custom functionality, you can modify queries that only need parameter binding by annotating the query method with @Modifying, as shown in the following example:

Declaring manipulating queries

The result of a modifying query can be:

The @Modifying annotation is only relevant in combination with the @Query annotation. Derived custom methods do not require this annotation.

Query string definitions can be used together with SpEL expressions to create dynamic queries at runtime. SpEL expressions can provide predicate values which are evaluated right before executing the query.

Expressions expose method arguments through an array that contains all the arguments. The following query uses [0] to declare the predicate value for lastname (which is equivalent to the :lastname parameter binding):

SpEL in query strings can be a powerful way to enhance queries. However, they can also accept a broad range of unwanted arguments. You should make sure to sanitize strings before passing them to the query to avoid unwanted changes to your query.

Expression support is extensible through the Query SPI: org.springframework.data.spel.spi.EvaluationContextExtension. The Query SPI can contribute properties and functions and can customize the root object. Extensions are retrieved from the application context at the time of SpEL evaluation when the query is built.

The following table describes the strategies that Spring Data R2DBC offers for detecting whether an entity is new:

Spring Data R2DBC uses the ID to identify entities. The ID of an entity must be annotated with Spring Data’s @Id annotation.

When your database has an auto-increment column for the ID column, the generated value gets set in the entity after inserting it into the database.

One important constraint is that, after saving an entity, the entity must not be new anymore. Note that whether an entity is new is part of the entity’s state. With auto-increment columns, this happens automatically, because the ID gets set by Spring Data with the value from the ID column.

Spring Data query methods usually return one or multiple instances of the aggregate root managed by the repository. However, it might sometimes be desirable to create projections based on certain attributes of those types. Spring Data allows modeling dedicated return types, to more selectively retrieve partial views of the managed aggregates.

Imagine a repository and aggregate root type such as the following example:

Now imagine that we want to retrieve the person’s name attributes only. What means does Spring Data offer to achieve this? The rest of this chapter answers that question.

A large class of applications (those that do not use the database until after the Spring context has started) can use the database initializer with no further complications. If your application is not one of those, you might need to read the rest of this section.

The database initializer depends on a ConnectionFactory instance and runs the scripts provided in its initialization callback (analogous to an init-method in an XML bean definition, a @PostConstruct method in a component, or the afterPropertiesSet() method in a component that implements InitializingBean). If other beans depend on the same data source and use the data source in an initialization callback, there might be a problem because the data has not yet been initialized. A common example of this is a cache that initializes eagerly and loads data from the database on application startup.

To get around this issue, you have two options:

Changing your cache initialization strategy might be easy if the application is in your control and not otherwise. Some suggestions for how to implement this include:

Ensuring that the database initializer is initialized first can also be easy. Some suggestions on how to implement this include:

Spring Data automatically tries to detect a persistent entity’s constructor to be used to materialize objects of that type. The resolution algorithm works as follows:

The value resolution assumes constructor argument names to match the property names of the entity, i.e. the resolution will be performed as if the property was to be populated, including all customizations in mapping (different datastore column or field name etc.). This also requires either parameter names information available in the class file or an @ConstructorProperties annotation being present on the constructor.

The value resolution can be customized by using Spring Framework’s @Value value annotation using a store-specific SpEL expression. Please consult the section on store specific mappings for further details.

Once an instance of the entity has been created, Spring Data populates all remaining persistent properties of that class. Unless already populated by the entity’s constructor (i.e. consumed through its constructor argument list), the identifier property will be populated first to allow the resolution of cyclic object references. After that, all non-transient properties that have not already been populated by the constructor are set on the entity instance. For that we use the following algorithm:

Let’s have a look at the following entity:

Spring Data adapts specifics of Kotlin to allow object creation and mutation.

The following table explains how property types of an entity affect mapping:

The MappingR2dbcConverter can use metadata to drive the mapping of objects to rows. The following annotations are available:

The mapping metadata infrastructure is defined in the separate spring-data-commons project that is technology-agnostic. Specific subclasses are used in the R2DBC support to support annotation based metadata. Other strategies can also be put in place (if there is demand).

The mapping subsystem allows the customization of the object construction by annotating a constructor with the @PersistenceConstructor annotation. The values to be used for the constructor parameters are resolved in the following way:

When storing and querying your objects, it is often convenient to have a R2dbcConverter instance to handle the mapping of all Java types to OutboundRow instances. However, you may sometimes want the R2dbcConverter instances to do most of the work but let you selectively handle the conversion for a particular type — perhaps to optimize performance.

To selectively handle the conversion yourself, register one or more one or more org.springframework.core.convert.converter.Converter instances with the R2dbcConverter.

You can use the r2dbcCustomConversions method in AbstractR2dbcConfiguration to configure converters. The examples at the beginning of this chapter show how to perform the configuration with Java.

The following example of a Spring Converter implementation converts from a Row to a Person POJO:

Please note that converters get applied on singular properties. Collection properties (e.g. Collection<Person>) are iterated and converted element-wise. Collection converters (e.g. Converter<List<Person>>, OutboundRow) are not supported.

The following example converts from a Person to a OutboundRow:

Coroutines support is enabled when kotlinx-coroutines-core, kotlinx-coroutines-reactive and kotlinx-coroutines-reactor dependencies are in the classpath:

For return values, the translation from Reactive to Coroutines APIs is the following:

Flow is Flux equivalent in Coroutines world, suitable for hot or cold stream, finite or infinite streams, with the following main differences:

Read this blog post about Going Reactive with Spring, Coroutines and Kotlin Flow for more details, including how to run code concurrently with Coroutines.

Here is an example of a Coroutines repository:

Coroutines repositories are built on reactive repositories to expose the non-blocking nature of data access through Kotlin’s Coroutines. Methods on a Coroutines repository can be backed either by a query method or a custom implementation. Invoking a custom implementation method propagates the Coroutines invocation to the actual implementation method if the custom method is suspend`able without requiring the implementation method to return a reactive type such as `Mono or Flux.