Spring MVC 3.2 with Spring Data Rest (Part 1)

In this tutorial, we will update an existing Spring MVC app to Spring MVC 3.2 and add RESTful endpoints using Spring Data Rest. The goal is to demonstrate how we can implement HATEOAS methodology using Spring.

Before we start, please take some time to review our existing application: Spring MVC 3.1, jqGrid, and Spring Data JPA Integration Guide. If all you need is a pure Spring Data Rest application, please visit the official Spring Data Rest starter web application.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Configuration

• Update the pom.xml
• Update the web.xml
• Spring Configurations
• Repositories

Part 2: Running the application

Dependencies

• Spring core 3.2.0.RC1
• Spring Data Rest 1.0.0.RC3
• Spring Data JPA 1.1.0.RELEASE
• jQuery 1.6.4
• jqGrid 4.3.1
• See pom.xml for details

Github
To access the source code, please visit the project's Github repository (click here)

Update the pom.xml

Here are the changes that we need to do:

• Update the Spring core version
• Update the Spring Data JPA version
• Add Spring Data Rest dependency

Note: I also added the profiles section at the end of the pom.xml, so that we can expose the repositories in a clean manner.

Update the web.xml

Here are the changes that we need to do:

• Update the web-app version to 2.5 (optional)
• Update the display-name (optional)
• Add Spring Data Rest servlet

Spring Configurations

We need to do three tasks:

• Update the database name
• Create a spring-data-rest.xml
• Update the applicationContext.xml

Update the database name

Open the spring.properties under WEB-INF folder, and update it as follows:


In the original application, the declared database name is spring_jqgrid_tutorial, let's update it to spring_data_rest_tutorial (though this is really not needed).

Create a spring-data-rest.xml

Update the applicationContext.xml

There's not much update here. We just need to import the spring-data-rest.xml as follows:

Repositories

We need to do two tasks:

• Update UserRepository
• Create a new repository RoleRepository

The only update here is the addition of the annotation @Param to the UserRepository. This is required so that we can expose the parameters in the search queries.


We need to create a new repository for the Role domain so that we can expose it as RESTful endpoint:

Next

In the next section, we will build and run the application and test our RESTful endpoints. Click here to proceed.