How to remove hypermedia elements from representations produced by Spring Data REST?

Question

When using Spring Data for my REST API, the responses returned currently include the _links field:

{
  "_embedded": {
  "users": [
    {
      "imageUrl": "some_image_url",
      "name": "some name",
      "id": "57420b2a0d31bb6cef4ee8e9",
      "_links": {
        "self": {
          "href": "http://localhost:8080/users/57420b2a0d31bb6cef4ee8e9"
        },
        "user": {
          "href": "http://localhost:8080/users/57420b2a0d31bb6cef4ee8e9{?projection}",
          "templated": true
        }
      }
    },
...

Is there a way to produce output, such that the _links field is hidden? e.g.:

{
  "_embedded": {
  "users": [
    {
      "imageUrl": "some_image_url",
      "name": "some name",
      "id": "57420b2a0d31bb6cef4ee8e9",
    },
...

I find that because I am exposing the id field, _links are not really necessary, and mostly just clutter up my responses.

Answer 1

There isn't. Hypermedia is a fundamental trait of REST APIs and Spring Data REST heavily uses it to allow you to build clients that can use the links present in the responses to navigate to related resources.

Of course you can dumb down your clients to not make use of that information but that will lead to a much tighter coupling (as you can't change the URIs on the server side anymore, your clients expects to talk to a dedicated server whereas with hypermedia you can just point it to a different server etc.).

In contrast to a lot of other self-proclaimed REST frameworks out there, one of the key aspects of the framework's design is to respect the fundamental principles in REST and explicitly leverage them. Or at least, don't create incentives to easily break them. This is clearly expressed in the reference documentation and on the project website. Find out more about key design decisions in this presentation on Spring Data REST, and this one on Domain-Driven Design & REST.