Spring boot able to accept Enum as Request parameter

Question

So, I got into this new Spring Boot project which was already under developement and while writing API's I used Enum for @RequestParam in my controller and it worked.

I did not write any converters for this.

Later on I noticed that in this project the other developers had written custom Converter's for this.

So I decided to search the web regarding this and all solutions that came up for using Enum with Controller in Spring Boot used converter, could not find any examples without converter like how I did.

Below is one an example of how I wrote this, LoanStatus is an Enum:

@RequestMapping(value = "/loans", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public ResponseEntity<?> getPatientsLoan(HttpServletRequest request,
            @RequestParam(value = "loanStatus", required = false) LoanStatus loanStatus) {}

So is this a relatively new feature that Spring Boot accepts Enums now without the need for converter's and that is why all the examples used converters or will I face some issue in feature cause I did not user converter's even though it is currently working for me?

Answer 1

Spring has supported String to Enum conversion since Spring 3.0. There is a ConverterFactory which dynamically creates a converter for the specific enum.

Prior to that you would need to write a custom Converter or PropertyEditor to convert enums. But basicallly with the current versions you don't need to if the String matches the Enum name.

If you want custom enum conversion (by some internal value or whatever) you still would need a custom converter.