MongoTemplate doFind for ad-hoc query method visibility as protected.

[aleixmorgadas]

Need:
The method that's being called when using method-like queries has default package visibility, compared to other methods with protected visibility.

In order to extend MongoTemplate without placing the new class in the org.springframework.data.mongodb.core package, I added the protected as method visibility.

[mp911de]

This is by design as we do not want to expose the method. It has a very large number of arguments and exposing it removes our desire to freely change the method.

Let's take a step back: Can you elaborate on what you're trying to achieve?

[aleixmorgadas]

Sure!

We had to do some work around add filters to the query due to our system being multitenant and we wanted to avoid to add ifs everywhere to verify that the fetched data belongs to a tenant.

We extended MongoTemplate and added some annotations to allow that behaviour. The result is this OSS library.

https://github.com/aleixmorgadas/spring-boot-data-mongo-multitenant

You can see that we added the specific class into org.springframework.data.mongodb.core in order to extend the method as a work around.

The library isn't the best but it works.

[christophstrobl]

@aleixmorgadas thanks for providing additional information - In the light of this PR I think it would make sense to revisit #2067 and maybe even spring-projects/spring-data-commons#766.

[aleixmorgadas]

I'm happy to help here.

Right now, I took the approach of extending the behaviour via the @MultiTenant annotation at the Entity level. I'm considering do it at the Repository level instead.

I think it helps making the Repository more obvious by being:

interface UserRepository extends MultiTenantCrudRepository<User, ObjectId> {
    String tenantField() {
        return "tenant";
    }
}

Instead of

interface UserRepository extends CrudRepository<User, ObjectId> {
}

@MultiTenant
@Document
class User {
    @Id 
    ObjectId id;

    @MultiTenantField
    String tenant;
}

[oscarbrookssynacor]

Hi there,
This very simple change is currently blocking multiple long standing, and I would argue, highly impactful issues, some of which have been opened and asked about for over 10 years.
spring-projects/spring-data-commons#766
spring-projects/spring-security#2629
spring-projects/spring-security#6736

All of these ultimately are blocked by this change. In light of that I would like to request that this be given a higher priority.

[mp911de]

There's some tension in exposing internal methods because we have over time a lot of changes to internals. If your application would rely on these methods, these would break quite often. Instead it would make rather sense to introduce query post-processing hooks with a well-defined API.

[oscarbrookssynacor]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply, I understand your position, my goal is to simply try and facilitate getting the ball moving on those tickets I listed, I am not partial to the way this ticket gets resolved.
The option you are suggesting, what would it take to get that accomplished? I am fairly well versed in spring internals, but I have not worked with data-mongodb before.

[oscarbrookssynacor]

To add, it seems like there are no hard blocker to accomplishing any of the features on any of those tickets, and it seems like there is simply a lack of cross-communication between the projects, perhaps it would help to get all the respective folks involved in one conversation.