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Spring Boot: Entity Events & Auditing

TL;DR / when to use this: Two ways to react to entity lifecycle in Spring Boot: JPA lifecycle annotations on the entity itself, or a separate listener class via @EntityListeners. For audit columns (createdBy, createdDate, ...), use the built-in AuditingEntityListener plus an AuditorAware implementation.

JPA lifecycle annotations

Available on any @Entity:

Annotation Fires
@PrePersist / @PostPersist before / after insert
@PreUpdate / @PostUpdate before / after update
@PreRemove / @PostRemove before / after delete
@PostLoad after load from DB 
@Entity
public class MyEntity {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    @PrePersist
    public void beforePersist() {
        // custom logic, e.g. setting default values
    }
}

For separation of concerns, move the callbacks to a listener class (note the entity parameter) and associate it:

public class MyEntityListener {
    @PrePersist
    public void beforePersist(MyEntity entity) { /* ... */ }
}

@Entity
@EntityListeners(MyEntityListener.class)
public class MyEntity { /* ... */ }

AuditingEntityListener

Spring ships an auditing listener for the standard audit fields:

@Entity
@EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class)
public class Product {
    @CreatedBy
    private String createdBy;

    @LastModifiedBy
    private String updatedBy;

    @CreatedDate
    private LocalDateTime createdDate;

    @LastModifiedDate
    private LocalDateTime updatedDate;
}

Spring needs to know who the auditor is — implement AuditorAware:

@Component
public class SpringSecurityAuditorAware implements AuditorAware<String> {
    @Override
    public Optional<String> getCurrentAuditor() {
        Authentication authentication = SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication();
        if (authentication == null || !authentication.isAuthenticated()) {
            return Optional.of("system");
        }
        return Optional.of(authentication.getName());
    }
}

Enable it with @EnableJpaAuditing on a config class.

See also