Spring Data Rest: RepositoryEventHandler methods not invoked

Question

I am trying to add a RepositoryEventHandler as described on Spring Data REST documentation to the REST repository shown below:

@RepositoryRestResource(collectionResourceRel = "agents", path = "/agents")
public interface AgentRepository extends CrudRepository<Agent, Long> {
    // no implementation required; Spring Data will create a concrete Repository
}

I created an AgentEventHandler:

@Component
@RepositoryEventHandler(Agent.class)
public class AgentEventHandler {

    /**
     * Called before {@link Agent} is persisted 
     * 
     * @param agent
     */
    @HandleBeforeSave
    public void handleBeforeSave(Agent agent) {

        System.out.println("Saving Agent " + agent.toString());

    }
}

and declared it in a @Configuration component:

@Configuration
public class RepositoryConfiguration {

    /**
     * Declare an instance of the {@link AgentEventHandler}
     *
     * @return
     */
    @Bean
    AgentEventHandler agentEvenHandler() {

        return new AgentEventHandler();
    }
}

When I am POSTing to the REST resource, the Entity gets persisted but the method handleBeforeSave never gets invoked. What am I missing?

I'm using: Spring Boot 1.1.5.RELEASE

Solution 1

Sometimes obvious mistakes go unnoticed.

POST-ing a Spring Data REST resource, emits a BeforeCreateEvent. To catch this event, the method handleBeforeSave must be annotated with @HandleBeforeCreate instead of @HandleBeforeSave (the latter gets invoked on PUT and PATCH HTTP calls).

Tests pass successfully on my (cleaned up) demo app now.

Solution 2

How does your main Application class look like? Does it import the RepositoryRestMvcConfiguration as described in https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-rest/?

Comments

[dimi]

Marcel: I pushed an example project on github. Appreciate your help.

[Beamie]

Before I start doing a little matrix myself over which events are emitted on specific HTTP calls, is this documented somewhere? I had a look in the Spring Data REST documentation, but it only mentions the events, not in detail to which HTTP call they will be emitted.

[dimi]

@Beamie I did a quick search and couldn't find any documentation linking Spring Data REST events with HTTP verbs. The following should work tho: POST=>*CreateEvent, PUT=>*SaveEvent, DELETE=>*DeleteEvent. Detailed list of events: docs.spring.io/spring-data/rest/docs/current/reference/html/‌​…

[Vinícius M]

Note for future readers: the Events (BeforeCreate, BeforeSave, etc) are not called if you override the default controller methods, so keep that in mind.