How to generate an advanced search API in Spring Boot in 5 minutes

We just released our first open source library : Spring-search.

Spring-search provides a simple yet advanced query language to perform searches on a JPA entity.

For example, let's say you have the following Car model :

Our example is in Java, in order to show that spring-search works on any Spring Boot project. See our Github repository for a Kotlin example.

And the following Options model :

You want to get cars whose brand is "Aston Martin" or whose price is more than 10000$ and with an automatic transmission.

With Spring-search, the query : /search=(brand:'Aston Martin' OR price>100000) AND options.transmission:Auto will provide the desired result.

How do I install spring-search in my Spring Boot project ?

In Maven projects, simply add the repo to your project inside your pom.xml file.

How do I use spring-search once it is installed ?

Your repository should be annotated as a RepositoryRestResource and should extend JpaSpecificationExecutor

Import the library in your controller and use it in the following way

The previous query returns the following result :

What operations are possible in my queries ?

• The equal operation, using the : operator
• The not equal operation, using the ! operator
• The greater than and less than operators, respectively > and <
• The starts with/ends with/contains operator, using *. It acts like the bash * expension.
• The AND operator.
• The OR operator.
• Parenthesis can be used for grouping.
• You can access a deep field of an object using the . notation. For instance options.transmission in our example.

For usage examples, see our Github repository for the project.

I'd like a new feature, where can I ask for it ?

We'd love to hear new ideas for this project!

Feel free to create an issue on our Github issues page. Or you can even create a Pull Request on the repository, they will be greatly appreciated.