Previously, the SpEL expression created from JSON Patch path expressions were executed without double checking whether these paths actually exist on the target object in the first place. This check is now in place.
We now also catch SpelEvaluationException in the attempt to set a null value for an expression as Spring 5 now reports a failed attempt (e.g. if the target type is not nullable) using that type whereas Spring 4.3 threw a NullPointerException.
Fixed the setup of our custom ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver to conclude with a call to afterPropertiesSet() to make sure it's properly initialized.
When a PATCH call using JSON Patch tried to append an item to an empty collection, it previously failed to look up the type to unmarshal the incoming payload to. We now inspect the declared types on the wrapped object's property to determine that type for append operations.
Also, an uninitialized collection is now initialized using Spring's CollectionFactory.
So far, we handed the plain instance deserialized from the request body to the repository to persist it. That caused issues in PUT for create scenarios where the URI contains the identifier to be used for the aggregate to create and identifier generation being used in the backend. In that case the identifier submitted was never considered and subsequent requests would've created new instances, effectively breaking the idempotent nature of PUT.
We now make sure the backend identifier derived from the resource is set on the aggregate instance about to be created, so that backend can either accept that situation (new entity + manually defined identifier) or reject it (in case it insists on identifier generation).
Previously, when a request was sending an Accept header of some arbitrary *+json, the request was routed through the controllers and might have ended up producing a PersistentEntityResource that was then mapped using an uncustomized Jackson ObjectMapper. That has caused a huge JSON object to be unfolded which is highly undesirable.
We now only answer JSON requests to repository resources that contain an Accept header with any of the explicit JSON media types we got registered.
We also now make sure MVC is bootstrapped property for integration tests through the inclusion of DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration.
We previously erroneously looked for a ~ in a JSON Pointer to indicate collection append in e.g. an add operation. We now also support the actually correct - keeping the original behavior for now to not break clients that currently make use of it.
We now explicitly merge associations skipping the linkable ones. We also try to reuse the existing collections and maps if they're mutable falling back to a completely new one if not.
Extracted PropertyHandler and AssociationHandler implementations.
When merging collections on PATCH we now don't use the first collection item's type for all elements but inspect the values for each existing element found. When it comes to appending elements to the collection, wen now just stick to the declared component type as type hint for reading the provided value.
When copying the transient properties of an aggregate, we now try field based access first and fall back to accessor based copying in case both a setter and getter are exposed on the type.
Previously we always expected a field to be present which doesn't necessarily has to be the case.
Related ticket: DATAREST-986.
Jacksons ObjectMapper.readerForUpdate(…) unfortunately doesn't handle nested objects properly. We already have a manual merge process in place for PATCH requests but tweaking that to also handle PUT requests gracefully caused more complexity than anticipated.
We now switched to an object based merge so that we can read in the source JSON structure into a new object and then merge the objects.
Related pull request: #247.
We now use a Map property's generic type information to make sure we convert both the key and the value into the declared types. Previously we just used Object if the source value to map was null. Object is still used as fallback for raw maps though.
Skip all merge logic if the source value is null. That frees all nested logic from handling with that case and us falling back to plain Jackson reading.
The array handling now also opts out if the source value is not a collection or array in the first place as it means we need to let Jackson override the value with the collection given to be deserialized.
Original pull request: #246.
Fixed broken equals(…) in ProjectionDefinition. Switched to iterating over Map's entry set instead of the keys. Made UriAwareHttpServletRequest static.
Some tiny refactorings in DomainObjectReader. We're now using TypeInformation instead of Class to preserve more generics information when it comes to deeper nesting.
Moved some code around in the unit tests.
Original pull request: #245.
We now don't prematurely drop fields that don't have a persistent property exposed in DomainObjectReader. Doing so dropped values for transient fields as the latter are not exposed as persistent property in the first place. We still skip any nested merging though.
Original pull request: #240.
We now explicitly manually merge array nodes that contain complex objects. Previously arrays would've been skipped and the subsequent Jackson update would wipe out all properties not contained in the original document even on PATCH requests.
Previously, MappedProperties didn't handle Jackson properties correctly, that do not expose a PersistentProperty, e.g. transient ones. That led to potential nullPointerExceptions in clients as the guarding hasPersistentPropertyForField(…) still answered true, as the backing cache contained an entry with a null value. We now skip those properties completely.
Revert changes introduced by DATAREST-883 - Jackson-aware field translation in Sort and DATAREST-906 - Consider default pageable if Sort is null. The way how Sort translation was implemented breaks Sort and Pageable argument resolution for custom controllers as a domain type is always required. Argument resolution fails if the related domain type cannot be resolved.
Related pull requests: #231, #222.
