Can I make a custom controller mirror the formatting of Spring-Data-Rest / Spring-Hateoas generated classes?

Question

I\'m trying to do something I think should be really simple. I have a Question object, setup with spring-boot, spring-data-rest and spring-hateoas. All the basi

Answer 1

I believe I've solved this problem in a fairly straightforward way, although it could have been better documented.

After reading the implementation of SimplePagedResourceAssembler I realized a hybrid solution might work. The provided Resource class renders entities correctly, but doesn't include links, so all you need to do is add them.

My QuestionResourceAssembler implementation looks like this:

@Component
public class QuestionResourceAssembler implements ResourceAssembler> {

    @Autowired EntityLinks entityLinks;

    @Override
    public Resource toResource(Question question) {
        Resource resource = new Resource(question);

        final LinkBuilder lb = 
            entityLinks.linkForSingleResource(Question.class, question.getId());

        resource.add(lb.withSelfRel());
        resource.add(lb.slash("answers").withRel("answers"));
        // other links

        return resource;
    }
}

Once that's done, in my controller I used Option 2 above:

    return pagedResourcesAssembler.toResource(page, questionResourceAssembler);

This works well, and isn't too much code. The only hassle is you need to manually add links for each reference you need.