Spring Data force version and lastmodified date to update on JPA Entity

Spring data has a feature that allows you to track automatically a certain amount of fields through annotations :

• @CreatedDate : The date on which the entity was created
• @CreatedBy : The user that created the entity
• @LastModifiedDate : The date the entity was last modified
• @LastModifiedBy : The user that modified last the entity
• @Version : the version of the entity (increased each time the entity is modified and savesd)

Let's say for example we have this simple entity with the appropriate annotations :

entity

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@Entity @EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class) public class Contact implements Serializable {       private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;       @Id     @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)     private Long id;       @Version()     private Long version = 0L;       @NotNull     @CreatedDate     private Date creationDate;       @NotNull     @Size(max = 50)     @CreatedBy     private String creationUserLogin;       @NotNull     @LastModifiedDate     private Date modificationDate;       @NotNull     @Size(max = 50)     @LastModifiedBy     private String modificationUserLogin;      private String firstName;      private String lastName;    //GETTERS - SETTERS and other code        }

And we're using the following service class and repository :

Service class

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@Service public class ContactServiceImpl implements ContactService{      @Autowired    private ContactRepository contactRepository;       public Contact save(Contact contact){          return contactRepository.save(entity);   } }

Repository class class

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public interface ContactRepository extends JpaRepository<Contact, Long> {   }

Now whenever you change the value of one of the fields in the entity; the fields marked with @Version, @LastModified and @LastModifiedBy will be updated with new values automatically.

Now recently I had the case where I had to "touch" an entity (like in linux) so that the version will be increased as well as @LastModified and @LastModifiedBy will be updated accordingly even though none of the fields had been updated

Now you cannot update the automatically handled fields manually, but there is a way you can achieve this by using Spring's AuditingHandler; so we could modify our service class as follows :

Service class

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@Service public class ContactServiceImpl implements ContactService{       @Autowired     private ContactRepository contactRepository;       @Autowired     private AuditingHandler auditingHandler;            public Contact save(Contact contact, boolean forceVersionIncrease){          //force version update even though no values have changed in the entity          if(forceVersionIncrease){              auditingHandler.markModified(contact);          }           return contactRepository.save(entity);    } }

And there you go, you should be able now to "touch" your entities and force date and version updates