This tutorial will walk you through the steps of creating an example on handling circular references/dependencies of JPA/Hibernate entity bidirectional relationships with Jackson JsonIgnoreProperties, CRUD RESTful APIs, Spring Data REST, MySQL and Docker.
In practice, you may also like to handle the JPA/Hibernate circular references/dependencies problem with DTO design pattern. Check out the following tutorial as one of the approaches MapStruct Example of Mapping JPA/Hibernate Entity with DTO
What you'll need
- JDK 8+ or OpenJDK 8+
- Maven 3+
- MySQL Server 5+ or Docker CE 18+
Project structure
Project dependencies
Define JPA Entities Bidirectional Relationships with Jackson circular references handling
Jackson @JsonIgnoreProperties will prevent specified fields from being serialized or deserialized.
Lombok @EqualsAndHashCode with exclude will ignore specified fields on the generated equals and hashCode function of Lombok @Data
Define Repository
Spring Data REST will auto create RESTful APIs based on your domain model and repository.
Application Configurations
Run with JDK/OpenJDK and Maven
Type the below command at the project root directory
mvn clean spring-boot:run
Test circular references handling and RESTful APIs with curl
Create a new book
curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"title\" : \"Hello Koding\", \"description\": \"Simple coding examples and tutorials\"}" http://localhost:8080/books
Create a new author
curl -i -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"name\":\"Author 1\"}" http://localhost:8080/authors
Assign the author to the book
curl -i -X PUT -H "Content-Type:text/uri-list" -d "http://localhost:8080/authors/1" http://localhost:8080/books/1/authors
Find all books
curl http://localhost:8080/books
Find authors of book id 1
curl http://localhost:8080/books/1/authors
Find books of author id 1
curl http://localhost:8080/authors/1/books
