To configure a RedisTemplate
and learn how to access different operation bundles to read and write data to Redis from a Spring REST controller.
In this lesson, you will learn:
@RedisHash
annotation to map domain objects.@Id
to provide primary keys to your mapped objects.@Reference
to create referential associations between objects.If you get stuck:
In many applications, whether web applications or RESTful web services, one of the first parts of the domain to be implemented is the user/roles sub-domain. In Redi2Read, Users have one or more Roles, a typical one-to-many association.
In this section, we will embark on the creation of the Redi2Read domain models. We will use Lombok to simplify our POJOs, and using the Spring Data Redis @RedisHash
and other Spring Data annotations, we will configure our models to be persisted in Redis.
Role Model
Let’s start by creating the simplest of our domain’s classes, the Role class under the directory src/main/java/com/redislabs/edu/redi2read/models
. Let’s name the file Role.java
with the following contents:
package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models;
import lombok.Data;
@Data
public class Role {
private String id;
private String name;
}
We are starting with a class annotated using Lombok’s @Data
annotation, which adds @ToString
, @EqualsAndHashCode
, @Getter
/@Setter
, and a @RequiredArgsContructor
, giving us a fully formed Java POJO.
For the Spring Data Repositories to know how to map an instance of Role to a Redis Hash, we need to annotate the class with the @RedisHash annotation.
package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Id;
import org.springframework.data.redis.core.RedisHash;
import lombok.Builder;
import lombok.Data;
@Data
@RedisHash
public class Role {
@Id
private String id;
private String name;
}
@RedisHash can take as parameters a timeToLive of type Long, and a String value, which will override the default Redis key prefix (by default, the key prefix is the fully qualified name of the class plus a colon).
Within the class, most of the usual Spring Data annotations are supported. For Role, lets annotate the id field with the @Id annotation. Spring Data Redis will auto-generate and suitable id for the annotated type.
User Model
The User model will be used in a registration/signup method. To allow for server-side validation to be performed, we need to add a dependency to the Maven POM for the spring-boot-starter-validation library.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-validation</artifactId>
</dependency>
Now we can create the User class with the following contents: package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models;
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Set;
import javax.validation.constraints.Email;
import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;
import javax.validation.constraints.Size;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Id;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Reference;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Transient;
import org.springframework.data.redis.core.RedisHash;
import org.springframework.data.redis.core.index.Indexed;
import lombok.Data;
import lombok.EqualsAndHashCode;
import lombok.ToString;
@EqualsAndHashCode(onlyExplicitlyIncluded = true)
@ToString(onlyExplicitlyIncluded = true)
@Data
@RedisHash
public class User {
@Id
@ToString.Include
private String id;
@NotNull
@Size(min = 2, max = 48)
@ToString.Include
private String name;
@NotNull
@Email
@EqualsAndHashCode.Include
@ToString.Include
@Indexed
private String email;
@NotNull
private String password;
@Transient
private String passwordConfirm;
@Reference
private Set<Role> roles = new HashSet<Role>();
public void addRole(Role role) {
roles.add(role);
}
}
This class is a little more involved, so let’s break it down:
@Data
) whose instances can be persisted as Redis Hashes (@RedisHash
)@EqualsHashCode.Include
and @ToString.Include
@Id
@Indexed
. We will learn more about secondary indexes in the next lesson.javax.validation.constraints
annotations are used to denote fields as being of type @Email
, being @NotNull
-able, and restricting their @Size
@Transient
so that @RedisHash
does not attempt to serialize it to the databaseUser
’s roles, we have a Set
of Role
objects marked as @References
which will cause them to be stored as the id of a given role in the Redis Hash backing a User
instance.Role
s to the User
’s Role Set.Now that we have two models properly annotated, we need associated repositories to perform data operations on said models. A Spring Data Repository is similar to the DAO (Data Access Object) pattern in that they both abstract operations against the underlying data storage. The difference is that repositories further abstract the underlying storage mechanism by focusing on the management of a collection of objects, while DAOs are more SQL/Table centric.
Under the src/main/java/com/redislabs/edu/redi2read/repositories
let's create the RoleRepository interface as follows:
package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.repositories;
import com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role;
import org.springframework.data.repository.CrudRepository;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository;
@Repository
public interface RoleRepository extends CrudRepository<Role, String> {
}
Our repository extends CrudRepository
for the Role
class with key of type String
, it provides basic CRUD and finder operations.
Spring Data Redis repositories are highly performant; they avoid using reflection and byte-code generation and instead use programmatic
JDK proxies instances using Spring’s ProxyFactory API. See https://bit.ly/2PshxEI
Let’s test the RoleRepository
by using a CommandLineRunner
implementation. A Spring CommandLineRunner
is an interface that tells the Spring container
that the run method needs to be executed upon startup.
A Spring Boot application can have many CommandLineRunner
s; to control the order of their execution, we can further annotate them with the @Order
annotation.
Create the directory src/main/java/com/redislabs/edu/redi2read/boot
and then add the CreateRoles
class:
package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.boot;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
@Component
@Order(1)
public class CreateRoles implements CommandLineRunner {
@Override
public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
System.out.println(">>> Hello from the CreateRoles CommandLineRunner...");
}
}
Our CreateRoles
class will run on each server start-up or on each live reload (since we are using Spring DevTools).
The @Order
annotation takes a numeric value indicating the order of execution.
To test the command line runner we have a System.out.println
in the run method that we can watch fly by on the console.
2021-04-02 14:32:58.374 INFO 41500 --- [ restartedMain] c.r.edu.redi2read.Redi2readApplication : Started Redi2readApplication in 0.474 seconds (JVM running for 74714.143)
>>> Hello from the CreateRoles CommandLineRunner...
2021-04-02 14:32:58.375 INFO 41500 --- [ restartedMain] .ConditionEvaluationDeltaLoggingListener : Condition evaluation unchanged
Now that we know the CreateRoles
component runs, let's complete it to work with the RoleRepository
.
package com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.boot;
import com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role;
import com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.repositories.RoleRepository;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j;
@Component
@Order(1)
@Slf4j
public class CreateRoles implements CommandLineRunner {
@Autowired
private RoleRepository roleRepository;
@Override
public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
if (roleRepository.count() == 0) {
Role adminRole = Role.builder().name("admin").build();
Role customerRole = Role.builder().name("customer").build();
roleRepository.save(adminRole);
roleRepository.save(customerRole);
log.info(">>>> Created admin and customer roles...");
}
}
}
We begin by injecting an instance of RoleRepository
using the @Autowired
annotation. Since we don’t want the roles to be created on each restart of the server,
our logic will only execute when the RoleRepository
has no Role
s.
If there are no Roles
, then we create the “admin” and “customer” roles using the Lombok builder. Then we save them to Redis using the RoleRepository
save method.
To properly log a message we’ll use the @Slf4j
(Simple Logging Facade for Java) annotation provided by Lombok, which creates a logger instance called log,
with the customary log level logging methods.
On server start we should now see, once, the output of our database seeding.
2021-04-02 19:28:25.367 INFO 94971 --- [ restartedMain] c.r.edu.redi2read.Redi2readApplication : Started Redi2readApplication in 2.146 seconds (JVM running for 2.544)
2021-04-02 19:28:25.654 INFO 94971 --- [ restartedMain] c.r.edu.redi2read.boot.CreateRoles : >>>> Created admin and customer roles...
Let’s use the Redis CLI to explore how the Role
s were stored, let’s use the KEYS command passing the Role fully qualified class name and a wildcard. Resulting in:
127.0.0.1:6379> KEYS com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role*
1) "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role:c4219654-0b79-4ee6-b928-cb75909c4464"
2) "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role:9d383baf-35a0-4d20-8296-eedc4bea134a"
3) "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role"
The first two values are Hash
es, actual instances of the Role
class. The string after the :
is the primary key of the individual Role. Let’s inspect one of those hashes:
127.0.0.1:6379> TYPE "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role:c4219654-0b79-4ee6-b928-cb75909c4464"
hash
127.0.0.1:6379> HGETALL "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role:c4219654-0b79-4ee6-b928-cb75909c4464"
1) "_class"
2) "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role"
3) "id"
4) "c4219654-0b79-4ee6-b928-cb75909c4464"
5) "name"
6) "admin"
Using the TYPE command returns, as expected that the value under the key is a Redis Hash. We use the HGETALL to “Get All” values in the Hash. The _class
is a metadata field which demarks the class of the object stored in the Hash.
Now let’s inspect the third value in the KEYS list:
127.0.0.1:6379> TYPE "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role"
set
127.0.0.1:6379> SMEMBERS "com.redislabs.edu.redi2read.models.Role"
1) "9d383baf-35a0-4d20-8296-eedc4bea134a"
2) "c4219654-0b79-4ee6-b928-cb75909c4464"
The Redis Set under the mapped class name is used to keep the primary keys maintained for a given class.