How to handle mongodb relation modeling with webflux?

Question

I have an old-ish (3 years) service I need to maintain and just joined the team. It is a spring-webflux app with mongodb (4). All models are defined with lombok and where there are relations between them, @DBRef annotation was used. It works fine, but now I have to bump up spring (and the rest of the dependencies) and I just realized @DBRef is no longer supported.

Somehow, I understand the decision, but I couldn't find any straight forward alternative other than doing myself all the cascade operations.

So, is there any easier way to approach this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

@DBRef has been replaced by @DocumentReference some time ago.

@DocumentReference: Applied at the field to indicate it is to be stored as a pointer to another document. This can be a single value (the id by default), or a Document provided via a converter.

This very simple example shows how it works:

   public class Account {
     private String id;
     private Float total;
   }
  
   public class Person {
     private String id;
     @DocumentReference
     private List<Account> accounts;
   }

For more details, have a look at the official docu:

https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/mongodb/docs/current/reference/html/#mapping-usage-annotations