How to configure Spring Data REST to return the representation of the resource created for a POST request?

Question

I am following the spring-data-rest guide Accessing JPA Data with REST. When I http post a new record it is inserted (and the response is a 201). That is great, but is there a w

Answer 1

You don't have to search for the created entity. As the HTTP spec suggests, POST requests returning a status code of 201 Created are supposed to contain a Location header which contains the URI of the resource just created.

Thus all you need to do is effectively issuing a GET request to that particular URI. Spring Data REST also has two methods on RepositoryRestConfiguration.setReturnBodyOnCreate(…) and ….setReturnBodyOnUpdate(…) which you can use to configure the framework to immediately return the representation of the resource just created.