Enable HAL serialization in Spring Boot for custom controller method

Question

I\'m trying to build a RESTful API with Spring Boot using spring-boot-starter-data-rest. There are some entities: accounts, transactions, categories and users - just the usu

Answer 1

To use PersistentEntityResourceAssembler in the controller we should mark it as @RepositoryRestController

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/categories")
@RepositoryRestController
public class CategoryController implements ValidableController {

// dependencies

@RequestMapping(method = POST, consumes = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
public ResponseEntity create(@Valid @RequestBody CategoryForm category,
                                                       BindingResult validation,
                                                       PersistentEntityResourceAssembler resourceAssembler)
{
    validate(validation);
    Category entity = categoryConverter.convert(category);
    entity = categoryService.save(entity);
    return ResponseEntity.ok(resourceAssembler.toFullResource(entity));
}

It builds pretty nice HAL styled response

{
"createdTime": "2018-07-24T00:55:32.854",
"updatedTime": "2018-07-24T00:55:32.855",
"name": "cfvfcdfgdfdfdfs32",
"options": [
    "aaa",
    "bbb"
],
"_links": {
    "self": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/shop/categories/34"
    },
    "category": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/shop/categories/34{?projection}",
        "templated": true
    },
    "products": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/shop/categories/34/products"
    },
    "categories": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/shop/categories/34/categories{?projection}",
        "templated": true
    },
    "parent": {
        "href": "http://localhost:8080/shop/categories/34/parent{?projection}",
        "templated": true
    }
}

}