One post tagged with "java"

When building out your domain model it is tempting to annotate your entities with @Data.

@Data is a shortcut for @ToString, @EqualsAndHashCode, @Getter on all fields, @Setter on all non-final fields, and @RequiredArgsConstructor ¹.

For example:

@Entity
@Data
class Author {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE)
    private Long id;
    
    private String name;
    
    @OneToMany
    private Set<Book> books;
    
    public Set<Book> getBooks() {
        /* fetches books from database if books is null */
    }
}

Now, lets say you fetch a list of authors from the database and log them. Your logger proceeds to log these authors by calling toString() This will in turn call getBooks() which will do further queries. You have just introduced N+1 queries while fetching author for data you will never use! For this reason, I would mark all associations with @ToString.Exclude

Similar problem arises when you use .equals(other), provided by @EqualsAndHashCode. With entities, equals may be done by comparing id (the primary key). Annotating your primary key attribute with @EqualsAndHashCode.Include, will ensure that only primary key is used for hash code calculation and equals.

With this advice our entity becomes:

@ToString
@EqualsAndHashCode
@Getter
@Setter
@RequiredArgsConstructor
@Entity
class Author {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE)
    @EqualsAndHashCode.Include
    private Long id;
    
    private String name;

    @ToString.Exclude
    @OneToMany
    private Set<Book> books;
    
    public Set<Book> getBooks() {
        /* fetches books from database if books is null */
    }
}