Spring Data JPA

Suppose you have the Book entity using Spring Boot Data JPA.

@Entity
class Book(
    @Id
    val id: Int,
    val title: String,
    val author: String
)

And you need to filter by the author and the title. You can create an instance of the Criteria class and define the filters with the values.

val criteria = Criteria(
    filters = listOf(
        Filter("title", "Kotlin", FilterOperator.CONTAINS),
        Filter("author", "Svetlana Isakova", FilterOperator.EQUALS)
    )
)

This instance of the Criteria class will filter by books with title that contains the "Kotlin" word and by the author "Svetlana Isakova"

To perform a query using this criteria you will need to implement on our JPA Repository the JpaSpecificationExecutor<T> interface for allow to execute queries through the spring Specification<T> interface.

@Repository
interface BookRepository : CrudRepository<Book, Long>, JpaSpecificationExecutor<Book>

Now we can autowire BookRepository and execute the query with our criteria instance.

@Autowired
lateinit var bookRepository: BookRepository

val adapter = CriteriaJPASpecificationAdapter()
val result = adapter.apply(criteria, bookRepository)
// The result variable contains the collection of Book instances

How to add joins on criteria

Now imagine you have the BookAuthor entity that is related with the Book entity with a OneToMany relationship

@Entity
class Book(
    //...
    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "author_id")
    var author: BookAuthor,
)

@Entity
class BookAuthor(
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    var id: Long? = null,
    var name: String,
    val birthDate: Instant,

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "author")
    val books: MutableList<Book> = mutableListOf(),
)

We can add a join from the Book entity to BookAuthor entity for create a criteria that filters by the author name. For this we need to create a join map.

The join map is simple, you need to define a Map with a key that is the relation name and as value the join definition.

mapOf(
    "<relation name>" to join<Book, BookAuthor>("<property that has the relation on Book entity>", JoinType.INNER) // The join definition
)

As the last example we need to call the adapt method from CriteriaJPASpecificationAdapter and add the join map on the adapt method

@Autowired
lateinit var bookRepository: BookRepository

val criteria = Criteria(
    filters = listOf(
        // We use the relation notation as filter name, first the relation name defined
        // as the key on the join map and the related field name before the "."
        // NOTE: the related field name is a property name of BookAuthor entity
        Filter("author.name", "Svetlana Isakova", FilterOperator.EQUALS)
    )
)

val adapter = CriteriaJPASpecificationAdapter()
val result = adapter.apply(criteria, bookRepository) {
    mapOf(
        "author" to join<Book, BookAuthor>("author", JoinType.INNER)
    )
}
// The result variable contains the collection of filtered Book instances

If you have a FieldMap you can add it into the CriteriaJPASpecificationAdapter constructor.

val fieldMap = mapOf(
    // this will indicate the field author_name points to author.name related field
    "author_name" to "author.name"
)
// ...
val adapter = CriteriaJPASpecificationAdapter(fieldMap)
val result = adapter.apply(criteria, bookRepository)

How to add joins on criteria ​

How to add joins on criteria