Adding a resource to a collection using spring-data-rest - spring-data

Question

My situation:
I have an Organization that can have many workers. I am trying to add a new worker to an organization following this example by the major contributing author of the SDR project and I get various errors (including 204 but nothing happens).
Here are my entities and rest calls:
#Entity
public class Organization {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long id;
#OneToMany
#JoinTable(name = "OrganizationWorker", joinColumns = {#JoinColumn(name = "OrganizationID")},
inverseJoinColumns = {#JoinColumn(name = "WorkerID")})
private Set<Worker> workers = new LinkedHashSet<>();
}
public class Worker {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long id;
#NotNull
private String givenName;
#NotNull
private String familyName;
#NotNull
private LocalDate dob;
#NotNull
private String nationalId;
private byte[] photo;
}
GET http://localhost:8080/hal
{
"_links": {
"workers": {
"href": "http://localhost:8080/hal/workers{?page,size,sort}",
"templated": true
}
}
}
POST http://localhost:8080/hal/workers
{
"givenName": "James",
"familyName": "Bond",
"dob": "1970-01-01",
"nationalId": "XXX-60-XXXX",
"photo": null,
}
Response:
Location: http://localhost:8080/hal/workers/8
Date: Mon, 02 May 2016 16:53:02 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
X-Application-Context: application
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=UTF-8
{
"givenName": "James",
"familyName": "Bond",
"dob": "1970-01-01",
"nationalId": "XXX-60-XXXX",
"photo": null,
"_links": {
"self": {
"href": "http://localhost:8080/hal/workers/8"
},
"worker": {
"href": "http://localhost:8080/hal/workers/8"
}
}
}
Final step, as per link in description:
curl -X PUT -H "ContentType: text/uri-list" http://localhost:8080/hal/organizations/2 -d 'http://localhost:8080/hal/workers/8'
{
"cause": null,
"message": "Target bean is not of type of the persistent entity!"
}
Doing some debug it's pretty obvious what the specific complaint is. The stack trace leads here:
#Override
public PersistentPropertyAccessor getPropertyAccessor(Object bean) {
Assert.notNull(bean, "Target bean must not be null!");
Assert.isTrue(getType().isInstance(bean), "Target bean is not of type of the persistent entity!");
return new BeanWrapper<Object>(bean);
}
getType() -> Organization
isInstance(bean) -> bean instance of org.springframework.hateoas.Resource
Any input on this? I followed the instructions to the letter.

Answer 1

Here is the answer (it took going out for a walk to clear my head and hit this).
You have to post to the association resource
http://localhost:8080/hal/organizations/1/workers
That nugget occurred to me and then I went and re-read the post.
For dumb mistakes like mine, a 400 error would have been much more useful.