Auditing and @Embedded in Spring Data JPA

With spring-data 2.4.4 the AuditListener works fine with embedded objects, see documentation spring-data

The minimal version of spring-data is bundled in spring-boot version 2.4.3

Update: This functionality has been added to Spring Data 2.1 M2 (Lovelace). https://jira.spring.io/browse/DATACMNS-1274

Spring Data audit annotations in nested (embeddable) classes isn't supported yet. Here's the jira ticket requesting this feature.

However, we could use custom audit listener to set audit information in embeddable classes.

Here's the sample implementation taken from a blog: How to audit entity modifications using the JPA @EntityListeners, @Embedded, and @Embeddable annotations.

Embeddable Audit

@Embeddable
public class Audit {

    @Column(name = "created_on")
    private LocalDateTime createdOn;

    @Column(name = "created_by")
    private String createdBy;

    @Column(name = "updated_on")
    private LocalDateTime updatedOn;

    @Column(name = "updated_by")
    private String updatedBy;

    //Getters and setters omitted for brevity
}

Audit Listener

public class AuditListener {

    @PrePersist
    public void setCreatedOn(Auditable auditable) {
        Audit audit = auditable.getAudit();

        if(audit == null) {
            audit = new Audit();
            auditable.setAudit(audit);
        }

        audit.setCreatedOn(LocalDateTime.now());
        audit.setCreatedBy(LoggedUser.get());
    }

    @PreUpdate
    public void setUpdadtedOn(Auditable auditable) {
        Audit audit = auditable.getAudit();

        audit.setUpdatedOn(LocalDateTime.now());
        audit.setUpdatedBy(LoggedUser.get());
    }
}

Auditable

public interface Auditable {

    Audit getAudit();

    void setAudit(Audit audit);
}

Sample Entity

@Entity
@EntityListeners(AuditListener.class)
public class Post implements Auditable {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    @Embedded
    private Audit audit;

    private String title;

  }