spring data jpa @Entity property not found exception

Question

I am new to the spring-data-jpa and am currently trying to implement with hibernate. I've followed the tutorial! for this and am currently facing issues starting the application itself. I get the following exception during startup:

 Caused by: org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyReferenceException: No property customer found for type com.adaptris.dashboard.customer.Customer
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.<init>(PropertyPath.java:74)
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.create(PropertyPath.java:326)
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.create(PropertyPath.java:352)
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.create(PropertyPath.java:306)
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.from(PropertyPath.java:270)
at org.springframework.data.mapping.PropertyPath.from(PropertyPath.java:244)
at org.springframework.data.repository.query.parser.Part.<init>(Part.java:73)
at org.springframework.data.repository.query.parser.PartTree$OrPart.<init>(PartTree.java:180)
at org.springframework.data.repository.query.parser.PartTree$Predicate.buildTree(PartTree.java:260)
at org.springframework.data.repository.query.parser.PartTree$Predicate.<init>(PartTree.java:240)
at org.springframework.data.repository.query.parser.PartTree.<init>(PartTree.java:71)
at org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.PartTreeJpaQuery.<init>(PartTreeJpaQuery.java:57)
at org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.JpaQueryLookupStrategy$CreateQueryLookupStrategy.resolveQuery(JpaQueryLookupStrategy.java:90)
at org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.JpaQueryLookupStrategy$CreateIfNotFoundQueryLookupStrategy.resolveQuery(JpaQueryLookupStrategy.java:162)
at org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.JpaQueryLookupStrategy$AbstractQueryLookupStrategy.resolveQuery(JpaQueryLookupStrategy.java:68)
at org.springframework.data.repository.core.support.RepositoryFactorySupport$QueryExecutorMethodInterceptor.<init>(RepositoryFactorySupport.java:280)
at org.springframework.data.repository.core.support.RepositoryFactorySupport.getRepository(RepositoryFactorySupport.java:148)
at org.springframework.data.repository.core.support.RepositoryFactoryBeanSupport.getObject(RepositoryFactoryBeanSupport.java:125)
at org.springframework.data.repository.core.support.RepositoryFactoryBeanSupport.getObject(RepositoryFactoryBeanSupport.java:41)
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.doGetObjectFromFactoryBean(FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.java:142)

Customer is my domain class annotated with

@Entity(name = "customer")

And I suppose it is trying to connect to the DB and fetch the customer table which I've actually configured. Here is my spring-config:

<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager" />
<!-- Activate Spring Data JPA repository support -->
<jpa:repositories base-package="com.adaptris.dashboard.customer" />

    <!-- Declare a datasource that has pooling capabilities -->
<bean id="jpaDataSource" class="com.mchange.v2.c3p0.ComboPooledDataSource"
    destroy-method="close" p:driverClass="${app.jdbc.driverClassName}"
    p:jdbcUrl="${app.jdbc.url}" p:user="${app.jdbc.username}" p:password="${app.jdbc.password}"
    p:acquireIncrement="5" p:idleConnectionTestPeriod="60" p:maxPoolSize="100"
    p:maxStatements="50" p:minPoolSize="10" />

<!-- Declare a JPA entityManagerFactory -->
<bean id="entityManagerFactory"
    class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean"
    p:persistenceXmlLocation="classpath*:META-INF/persistence.xml"
    p:persistenceUnitName="hibernatePersistenceUnit" p:dataSource-ref="jpaDataSource"
    p:jpaVendorAdapter-ref="hibernateVendor" />

<!-- Specify our ORM vendor -->
<bean id="hibernateVendor"
    class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter"
    p:showSql="false" />

<!-- Declare a transaction manager -->
<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager"
    p:entityManagerFactory-ref="entityManagerFactory" />

And the DB is MYSQL which is running. Following are the properties:

# database properties
app.jdbc.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
app.jdbc.url=jdbc\:mysql\://Mallik-PC/adaptrisschema
app.jdbc.username=dbuser
app.jdbc.password=dbpassword

Please help me out in getting out of this issue!!

Answer 1

Sounds like the Repository interface you have specified for your Domain class contains a findXXX method whereas XXX is not a property of your Domain class.

Example:

public interface UserRepository extends CrudRepository<User, String> {

    /**
     * Finds a user by name.
     * 
     * @param name The name of the User to find.
     * @return The User with the given name.
     */
    public User findByName(String name);
}

And your Domain class looks like this and misses the "name" property:

@Entity
public class User {
    private String firstname;
    private String lastname;
    // No "private String name" in here!
    ... 
}

In your particular example it looks like you added a findByCustomer(Customer customer) method to your Repository interface (probably called something like CustomerRepository). You don't need that method as a findOne(<PrimaryKeyClass> id) method is automatically generated for you by Spring Data for JPA and you can just call it with the @Id of your Domain class Customer as a parameter.

Answer 2

Spring ORM's LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean (as of 3.1 i think) has a property called 'packagesToScan'. unless you've got additional vendor properties that you want to set through persistence.xml, remove the p:persistenceXmlLocation and replace with

p:packagesToScan="[package name where your entities are]"

this tells the LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean where to find all your @Entity pojos and includes them in your EntityManagerFactory so Spring Data JPA can find where to put 'customer'