In case no ObjectMapper bean has been configured explicitly, the Spring MVC infrastructure registers HttpMessageConverters directly and does not declare them as Spring beans. Thus we now also inspect RequestMappingHandlerAdapter and AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter instances for their HttpMessageConverters and transparently augment the ObjectMappers backing potentially registered Jackson converters.
The annotation registers supporting application components as Spring beans based on the configured hypermedia type. Currently supported are the default rendering as well as HAL. We register a matching LinkDiscoverer implementation as well as the appropriate Jackson modules (if present on the classpath) to support HAL.
Upgraded to Spring 3.1.4 to benefit from fix to prevent multiple invocations of ImportBeanDefinitionRegistrars (see SPR-9939 / SPR-9925).
Introduced UriComponentsContributor interface to allow components to enhance the UriComponentsBuilder used while building links point in to controller methods.
Moved logic from ControllerLinkBuilder into ControllerLinkBuilderFactory as we now potentially need access to Spring injected components. Might be necessary to get rid of the static LinkBuilder implementations entirely.
EntityLinks allow accessing LinkBuilders or even Link instance based on components exposing REST resources for a particular domain type. The core implementation is ControllerEntityLinks that assumes a particular URI structure so that it can derive the URIs to be asked for per domain type. The domain type managed will be inspected from the @ExposesResourceFor annotation on a controller class. We provide a factory bean to allow configuring instances of ControllerEntityLinks based on a mapping annotation and LinkBuilderFactory.
Added infrastructure to activate automatic discovery of EntityLinks implementations through @EnableEntityLinks. This will automatically register ControllerEntityLinks instances for Spring MVC controllers annotated with @ExposesResourceFor as well as JAX-RS resources if JAX-RS is on the classpath. The mechanism essentially registers a DelegatingEntityLinks instance leveraging the Spring Plugin PluginRegistry mechanism to delegate to the actual EntityLinks instance actually registered for the entity type. It will become the primary EntityLinks bean in the ApplicationContext so that they can be autowired into client components safely.
