Trouble with PATCH Requests in Spring Boot REST API - Missing Fields Ignored
I'm collaborating on a project where Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy. I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm working on a Spring Boot REST API and I'm having trouble with PATCH requests. Specifically, when I send a PATCH request to update a resource, any field that I don't include in the request body is being set to null in my entity. This is not the behavior I expected; I thought PATCH would only update the fields that are included in the request, leaving others unchanged. I'm using Spring Boot version 2.6.4 with Jackson for JSON serialization. Here's a snippet of my controller method: ```java @RestController @RequestMapping("/api/users") public class UserController { @PatchMapping("/{id}") public ResponseEntity<User> updateUser(@PathVariable Long id, @RequestBody Map<String, Object> updates) { User existingUser = userRepository.findById(id).orElseThrow(() -> new ResourceNotFoundException("User not found")); updates.forEach((key, value) -> { Field field = ReflectionUtils.findField(User.class, key); if (field != null) { field.setAccessible(true); ReflectionUtils.setField(field, existingUser, value); } }); userRepository.save(existingUser); return ResponseEntity.ok(existingUser); } } ``` I also checked that my `User` class has the appropriate fields and getters/setters. I tried sending the following PATCH request: ```json { "name": "John Doe" } ``` But after the request, the `email` field of the user object is set to null if it wasn't included in the request body. How can I ensure that only the specified fields are updated and the others retain their original values? Is there a better way to handle this without resorting to a full `PUT` request? I’ve read about using DTOs, but I'm not sure how they would fit in this scenario. Any guidance would be appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? The project is a CLI tool built with Java. Any advice would be much appreciated. Any pointers in the right direction? The project is a service built with Java. Thanks in advance!