REST Expanders 4.0.0

Changes and improvements

Migrating to QuerySearch metamodel

Since version 3.x of rest-expanders, which was released just over a year ago, rest-expanders has integrated with querysearch-expanders by using the QuerySearch metamodel. This was introduced in such a way that it was 100% backwards compatible and also added to the model when expanding implicitly, so no change could really be observed from the perspective of an application developer.

Today the QuerySearch metamodel has matured to the point that what currently exists of the model is stable and will no longer have any big structural changes that are not additive. So with this version of rest-expanders, the implicitly added model will be removed. This means that it has to be defined in the model by the developer and coupled to the rest-expanders using the relevant jaxrs.querySearch option that has been implicitly used for quite some time.

The transmuters to add default REST APIs to the model have been modified to do this automatically, so in that sense, there will be no change to the way of interacting with rest-expanders in the majority of cases.

DataCommand options

In rest-expanders version 3.8.0, options were introduced to mark the DataCommands that are to be used for the CRUD operations in the REST API. Starting with this version, the validation to check if this has been migrated has been removed, as well as them being implicitly added to the model. We assume that every project has been migrated by now, but this will be the last version where the Upgrade transmutation for rest-expanders does this migration automatically.

Migration guide

Migration to the QuerySearch metamodel

Migrating to the QuerySearch metamodel is very easy. It was previously added based on specific rules, which have been moved as a feature to the upgrade transmutation for rest-expanders. Simply running this transmutation will be sufficient to update the model and create all QuerySearch elements in such a way that it is fully backward compatible.

In µRadiant, run the "Upgrade Rest Expanders Model" transmutation on the Application model:

On command-line, you can execute the transmutation as:

mvn expanders:transmute-model -Dtransmutation=UpgradeRestExpandersModel -DtargetElement=applicationName::applicationVersion

Migration to DataCommand options

The options must be added to the relevant commands to couple them to the REST API. In the old system, the mapping was as follows and should be migrated as such:

Command name	Option
create<dataElement.name>	jaxrs.command.create
modify<dataElement.name>	jaxrs.command.modify
update<dataElement.name>	jaxrs.command.update
remove<dataElement.name>	jaxrs.command.remove

The upgrade transmutation for rest-expanders can also be used to do this automatically (see previous migration), but this will be removed after version 4.0.0.