How do I update an entity using spring-data-jpa?

Since the answer by @axtavt focuses on JPA not spring-data-jpa

To update an entity by querying then saving is not efficient because it requires two queries and possibly the query can be quite expensive since it may join other tables and load any collections that have fetchType=FetchType.EAGER

Spring-data-jpa supports update operation.
You have to define the method in Repository interface.and annotated it with @Query and @Modifying.

@Modifying
@Query("update User u set u.firstname = ?1, u.lastname = ?2 where u.id = ?3")
void setUserInfoById(String firstname, String lastname, Integer userId);

@Query is for defining custom query and @Modifying is for telling spring-data-jpa that this query is an update operation and it requires executeUpdate() not executeQuery().

You can specify the return type as int, having the number of records being updated.

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Note: Run this code in a Transaction.

Identity of entities is defined by their primary keys. Since firstname and lastname are not parts of the primary key, you cannot tell JPA to treat Users with the same firstnames and lastnames as equal if they have different userIds.

So, if you want to update a User identified by its firstname and lastname, you need to find that User by a query, and then change appropriate fields of the object your found. These changes will be flushed to the database automatically at the end of transaction, so that you don't need to do anything to save these changes explicitly.

EDIT:

Perhaps I should elaborate on overall semantics of JPA. There are two main approaches to design of persistence APIs:

• insert/update approach. When you need to modify the database you should call methods of persistence API explicitly: you call insert to insert an object, or update to save new state of the object to the database.

• Unit of Work approach. In this case you have a set of objects managed by persistence library. All changes you make to these objects will be flushed to the database automatically at the end of Unit of Work (i.e. at the end of the current transaction in typical case). When you need to insert new record to the database, you make the corresponding object managed. Managed objects are identified by their primary keys, so that if you make an object with predefined primary key managed, it will be associated with the database record of the same id, and state of this object will be propagated to that record automatically.

JPA follows the latter approach. save() in Spring Data JPA is backed by merge() in plain JPA, therefore it makes your entity managed as described above. It means that calling save() on an object with predefined id will update the corresponding database record rather than insert a new one, and also explains why save() is not called create().