020de45c1b
This commit adds the support to expose additional resources that serve ALPS [0] resources to document the available state transitions and representations. The exposure is enabled by default and can be customized using the RepositoryRestConfiguration.metadataConfiguration() object.
Currently the set of descriptors exposed includes:
- A descriptor for the representation of the domain type. Linkable associations are represented as safe descriptors, ones that are not linked are semantic descriptors.
- Descriptors for each supported HTTP method for both the collection and item resources to indicate the ability to update, create, delete etc.
- Safe descriptors (e.g. to access the collection or item resource) get potentially available customizations (pagination, projections) attached through nested descriptors.
Documentation
An ALPS descriptor contains a doc attribute to carry semantic information for the end user or a potential client to display. The information can be described in two ways: the first one is the @Description annotation that captures the plain text information one wants to get listed. It is supported in @RepositoryRestResource, on query methods, projection interfaces and accessors etc.
The preferred approach however is to use a resource bundle rest-messages.properties. For each descriptor we will resolve a key starting with rest.description followed by a dot path into the resource. By default, doc attributes are only rendered if the resource bundle contains an entry for the relevant key. You can enforce displaying unresolved keys by configuring MetadataConfiguration.omitUnresolvableDescriptionKeys(…).
For representation descriptors and and the parameter list of query method descriptors we will display enum values by default as comma-separated list. The list is also available as message resolution argument, so that you can refer to the list in your description message via the {0} placeholder.
TODOs:
- Improve descriptors for associations (indicate ability to update etc.)
[0] ALPS - http://alps.io
Spring Data Rest
The goal of the project is to provide a flexible and configurable mechanism for writing simple services that can be exposed over HTTP.
The first exporter implemented is a JPA Repository exporter. This takes your JPA repositories and front-ends them with HTTP, allowing you full CRUD capability over your entities, to include managing associations.
Installation
Installation instructions are in the docs:
License
The Spring Data REST is Apache 2.0 licensed.
Contributing to Spring Data Rest##
Here are some ways for you to get involved in the community:
- Get involved with the Spring community on Stackoverflow. Please help out on the spring-data-rest tag by responding to questions and joining the debate.
- Create JIRA tickets for bugs and new features and comment and vote on the ones that you are interested in.
- Github is for social coding: if you want to write code, we encourage contributions through pull requests from forks of this repository. If you want to contribute code this way, please reference a JIRA ticket as well covering the specific issue you are addressing.
- Watch for upcoming articles on Spring by subscribing to spring.io.
Before we accept a non-trivial patch or pull request we will need you to sign the contributor's agreement. Signing the contributor's agreement does not grant anyone commit rights to the main repository, but it does mean that we can accept your contributions, and you will get an author credit if we do. Active contributors might be asked to join the core team, and given the ability to merge pull requests.
Note
We disabled the github issues since we want to use JIRA as the only issue tracker. All open existing issues have been automatically imported into JIRA, so nothing was lost :)