Dealing with non-spring data documents in couchbase - spring-data

Question

Is there a recommended way to go about dealing with documents that don't have the _class field with spring-data-couchbase( if there is one)? Trying it simply just throws an exception as expected.
Edit: Apologies if this was a bit too vague, let me add a bit more context.
I want to fetch data from couchbase for some student by name, let's say . The repository looks something like -
#Repository
public interface StudentRepository extends CouchbaseRepository {
Optional<StudentDocument> findByName(String name);
}
Now the documents in couchbase don't have the _class field OR say if we are entering a different "key" and "value" for _class field as we don't want to rely on it, so this method fails. I sort of hacked a workaround for this using -
`
#Override
public Student getStudent(String name) {
N1qlQuery query = N1qlQuery.simple(String.format("select *, META().id AS _ID, META().cas AS _CAS" +
" from student where name = \'%s\';", name));
return Optional.ofNullable(studentRepository.getCouchbaseOperations()
.findByN1QL(query, StudentWrapper.class)
.get(0))
.map(StudentWrapper::getStudent)
.orElseGet(() -> {
throw new HttpClientErrorException(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
});
}
`
I was wondering if there is an alternate way of achieving this

Answer 1

While using Spring spEL, Couchbase will automatically include the _class (or whatever attribute you have defined as your type) for you:
public interface AreaRepository extends CouchbaseRepository<Area, String> {
//The _class/type is automatically included by Couchbase
List<Area> findByBusinessUnityIdAndRemoved(String businessId, boolean removed);
}
However, if you want to use N1QL, you have to add the #{#n1ql.filter} :
public interface BusinessUnityRepository extends CouchbaseRepository<BusinessUnity, String>{
#Query("#{#n1ql.selectEntity} where #{#n1ql.filter} and companyId = $2 and $1 within #{#n1ql.bucket}")
BusinessUnity findByAreaRefId(String areaRefId, String companyId);
}
the #{#n1ql.filter} will automatically add the filter by type for you.