Spring Data MongoDB Annotation @CreatedDate isn't working, when ID is assigned manually

Question

I'm trying to use auditing to save dateCreated and dateUpdated in my objects, but since I set ID manually, there's some additional work.

Following Oliver Gierke's suggestion in DATAMONGO-946 I'm trying to figure out how to correctly implement it.

As original poster in Jira task above, I've downloaded example from here https://github.com/spring-guides/gs-accessing-data-mongodb.git and modified it a bit:

package hello;

import org.springframework.data.annotation.CreatedDate;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Id;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.LastModifiedDate;
import org.springframework.data.domain.Persistable;

import java.util.Date;

public class Customer implements Persistable<String> {
    @Id
    private String id;
    @CreatedDate
    private Date createdDate;
    @LastModifiedDate
    private Date lastModifiedDate;
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private boolean persisted;

    public Customer() {
    }

    public Customer(String firstName, String lastName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

    public void setPersisted(boolean persisted) {
        this.persisted = persisted;
    }

    @Override
    public String getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(String id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isNew() {
        return !persisted;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return String.format(
                "Customer[id=%s, createdDate=%s, lastModifiedDate=%s, firstName='%s', lastName='%s']",
                id, createdDate, lastModifiedDate, firstName, lastName);
    }
}

and

package hello;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.data.mongodb.config.EnableMongoAuditing;

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableMongoAuditing
public class Application implements CommandLineRunner {

    @Autowired
    private CustomerRepository repository;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }

    @Override
    public void run(String... args) throws Exception {

        repository.deleteAll();

        // create a customer
        Customer c = new Customer("Alice", "Smith");
        c.setId("test_id");

        // save a customer
        repository.save(c);

        // fetch all customers
        System.out.println("Customers found with findAll():");
        System.out.println("-------------------------------");
        for (Customer customer : repository.findAll()) {
            System.out.println(customer);
        }
        System.out.println();

        // create another customer with same id
        c = new Customer("Bob", "Smith");
        c.setId("test_id");
        c.setPersisted(true);
        repository.save(c);

        // fetch all customers
        System.out.println("Customers found with findAll():");
        System.out.println("-------------------------------");
        for (Customer customer : repository.findAll()) {
            System.out.println(customer);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
}

and a result of execution is this:

Customers found with findAll():
-------------------------------
Customer[id=test_id, createdDate=Wed Feb 24 00:43:47 WITA 2016, lastModifiedDate=Wed Feb 24 00:43:47 WITA 2016, firstName='Alice', lastName='Smith']

Customers found with findAll():
-------------------------------
Customer[id=test_id, createdDate=null, lastModifiedDate=Wed Feb 24 00:43:47 WITA 2016, firstName='Bob', lastName='Smith']

createdDate becomes null after object update.

What am I missing here? And how to correctly implement Persistable to make auditing work properly?

Answer 1

Your code is working as expected. After you've implemented Persistable you can see that @CreatedDate annotation is working.

Sure that createdDate is null on the second call of save because the object already exists in the database and you updated it with createdDate = null. As you can see from the documentation for @CreatedDate:

@CreatedDate annotation. This identifies the field whose value is set when the entity is persisted to the database for the first time.

So not to overwrite your createdDate with null on the second call you should retrieve your customer from the database with c = repository.findOne("test_id"); and then update it.