Using a Spring Data Rest @Projection as a representation for a resource in a custom controller

Question

Is there any way to use a @Projection interface as the default representation for a resource in SDR? Either through the SDR repositories or through a custom controller?

It used to be possible in a custom controller to do this by injecting a ProjectionFactory and using the createProjection method, but this has been broken by a recent Spring Data Rest update.

I would like to enforce a particular view on an entity, and the SDR projections seem like an ideal method for doing this, especially in the context of a HAL API, as opposed to writing hard DTO classes for a custom controller and mapping between them etc. Excerpt projections are not what I am after, as these only apply when looking at an associated resource.

Answer 1

To answer my own question, there's now a couple of easyish ways to do this.

You can make SDR repository finders return projections by default:

public interface PersonRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Person,Long> {

    Set<PersonProjection> findByLastName(String lastName);

}

You can also selectively override responses that SDR would have handled for you by default by creating a custom Spring MVC controller with the @BasePathAwareController. You will need to inject the ProjectionFactory and possibly the PagedResourcesAssembler if you're planning on providing a paged response.

@BasePathAwareController
public class CustomPersonController {

@Autowired
private ProjectionFactory factory;

@Autowired
private PersonRepository personRepository;

@Autowired
private PagedResourcesAssembler<PersonProjection> assembler;

@RequestMapping(value="/persons", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "application/hal+json")
public ResponseEntity<?> getPeople(Pageable pageable) {
    Page<Person> people = personRepository.findAll(pageable);
    Page<PersonProjection> projected = people.map(l -> factory.createProjection(PersonProjection.class, l));
    PagedResources<Resource<PersonProjection>> resources = assembler.toResource(projected);
    return ResponseEntity.ok(resources);
}