Spring Data Jpa Audit Example

Enable auditing with Spring Data Jpa’s @CreatedDate and @LastModified. For example with Spring Data MongoDB, please check out Spring Data MongoDB Audit Example.

Background

Spring Data Jpa provides auditing feature which includes @CreateDate, @CreatedBy, @LastModifiedDate, and @LastModifiedBy. In this example we will see how it can be implemented with very little configurations.

Entity Class

In this example we have an entity class, User which contains information about the table structure. Initial structure is as follows:

@Entity
class User {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    private String name;
    private String username;

    @CreatedBy
    private String createdBy;

    @CreatedDate
    private Instant created;

    @LastModifiedBy
    private String modifiedBy;

    @LastModifiedDate
    private Instant modified;

    // omitted getter / setter
}

As you can see it is a standard implementation of @Entity JPA class. We would like to keep track when an entry is created with created column and when it is modified with modified column.

Enable JpaAudit

In order to enable JPA Auditing for this project will need to apply three annotations and a configuration class. Those annotations are; @EntityListener, @CreatedDate, and @LastModifiedDate.

@EntityListener will be the one that is responsible to listen to any create or update activity. It requires Listeners to be defined. In this example we will use the default class, EntityListeners.

By annotating a column with @CreatedDate we will inform Spring that we need this column to have information on when the entity is created. While @LastModifiedDate column will be defaulted to @CreatedDate and will be updated to the current time when the entry is updated.

The final look of User class:

@Entity
@EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class)
class User {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    private String name;
    private String username;

    @CreatedBy
    private String createdBy;

    @CreatedDate
    private Instant created;

    @LastModifiedBy
    private String modifiedBy;

    @LastModifiedDate
    private Instant modified;

    // omitted getter / setter
}

As you can see User is now annotated with @EntityListeners while created, createdBy, modified, and modifiedBy columns are annotated with @CreatedDate, @CreatedBy, @LastModifiedDate, and @LastModifiedBy. createdBy and modifiedBy fields will be automatically populated if Spring Security is available in the project path. Alternatively we wil implement our own AuditorAware in order to inform Spring who is the current auditor.

We will do so in AuditConfiguration class. In this class, we will also inform Spring to enable JPA auditing by annotating it with @EnableJpaAuditing annotation.

@Configuration
@EnableJpaAuditing
class AuditConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public AuditorAware<String> auditorAwareRef() {
        return () -> Optional.of("Mr. Auditor");
    }

}

That’s it! Our application has JPA Auditing feature enabled. The result can be seen in UserAuditTests.

Verify Audit Implementation

There is no better way to verify an implementation other than running some tests. In our test class we have to scenario:

Create an entity which will have created and modified fields has values without us assigning them
Update created entity and created field will remain to have the same value while modified values will be updated

Create an entity

In the following test we will see that values for created and modified are assigned by Spring itself:

@Testcontainers
@DataJpaTest(properties = "spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create-drop", includeFilters = @Filter(type = ANNOTATION, classes = EnableJpaAuditing.class))
class UserAuditTests {

    @Container
    @ServiceConnection
    private final static MySQLContainer MYSQL = new MySQLContainer("mysql:lts");

    @Autowired
    private UserRepository repository;

    @Test
    @DisplayName("When a user is saved Then created and modified fields are set And createdBy and modifiedBy fields are set to Mr. Auditor")
    void create() {
        var user = new User("Rashidi Zin", "rashidi");

        var createdUser = repository.save(user);

        assertThat(createdUser).extracting("created", "modified").isNotNull();
        assertThat(createdUser).extracting("createdBy", "modifiedBy").containsOnly("Mr. Auditor");
    }

}

As mentioned earlier, we did not assign values for created and modified fields but Spring will assign them for us. Same goes with when we are updating an entry.

Update an entity

In the following test we will change the username without changing modified field. We will expect that modified field will have a recent time as compare to when it was created:

@Testcontainers
@DataJpaTest(properties = "spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create-drop", includeFilters = @Filter(type = ANNOTATION, classes = EnableJpaAuditing.class))
class UserAuditTests {

    @Container
    @ServiceConnection
    private final static MySQLContainer MYSQL = new MySQLContainer("mysql:lts");

    @Autowired
    private UserRepository repository;

    @Test
    @DisplayName("When a user is updated Then modified field should be updated")
    @Sql(statements = "INSERT INTO users (id, name, username, created, modified) VALUES ('84', 'Rashidi Zin', 'rashidi', now() - INTERVAL 7 DAY, now() - INTERVAL 7 DAY)")
    void update() {
        var modifiedUser = repository.findById(84L).map(user -> { user.setUsername("rashidi.zin"); return user; }).map(repository::saveAndFlush).orElseThrow();

        var created = (Instant) ReflectionTestUtils.getField(modifiedUser, "created");
        var modified = (Instant) ReflectionTestUtils.getField(modifiedUser, "modified");

        assertThat(modified).isAfter(created);
    }

}

As you can see at our final verification we assert that modified field should have a greater value than it previously had.

Conclusion

To recap. All we need in order to enable JPA auditing feature in this project are:

@EnableJpaAuditing
@EntityListeners
@CreatedBy
@CreatedDate
@LastModifiedBy
@LastModifiedDate