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
@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
public class ContactServiceImpl implements ContactService{

   @Autowired
   private ContactRepository contactRepository;


  public Contact save(Contact contact){
   
    return contactRepository.save(entity);
  }
}

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
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