Working With Spring Data JPA

SpringSource have recently released the first milestone of Spring Data JPA project. What are its features? and how can we use them. Spring framework already provides support to build a JPA based data access layer. So, what does Spring Data adds to it. I used it for one small application and found significant reduction of code. In this post we will use an Employee entity and EmployeeRepository as an example to work with Spring Data JPA.

We have a domain Employee :

@Entity
public class Employee {

  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
  private Long id;

  private String name;

  // … methods omitted
}

We also have a EmployeeRepository handling the Employee entities. The interface and the implementation are given below.

package com.inphina.springdata.repository;

public interface EmployeeRepository {
	
	Employee save(Employee employee);
	
	List<Employee> findAll();
	
	Employee findById(Long id);
	
	List<Employee> findByName(String name, int page, int pageSize);

}

Configuring Spring Application Using Configuration Annotation

A Spring Module called Java Config has been there for some time now. With the release of Spring 3.0 SpringSource has pulled this module into the core Spring Framework as @Configuration.

How can we use this @Configuration in our application? and should we use it when we have XML and annotations for configuration already?

In Spring 2.5 we find that there is a support for Property Externalization. Which was good in several ways than before. What it meant was, that the properties file could be modified for different build environments by the administrator.

One good thing about this approach is that the administrator need not edit the application context file. Editing verbose XML has plenty of room for errors. Editing the properties file on the other hand is a whole lot simpler and is less error prone.

For example for configuring the datasource this is what we do typically. We used Property externalization in Spring 2.5 using PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer.

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:datasource.properties" />
<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
		<property name="driverClassName"><value>${dataSource.driverClassName}</value></property>
		<property name="url"><value>${dataSource.url}</value></property>
		<property name="username"><value>${dataSource.username}</value></property>
		<property name="password"><value>${dataSource.password}</value></property>
</bean>