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.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sipios</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-search</artifactId>
    <version>0.2.0</version>
</dependency>

In Gradle projects, add implementation 'com.sipios:spring-search:0.2.0' in your build.gradle file.

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 :

example-query

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.

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.