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implementing Spring Data JPA and FetchType.EAGER Causing Infinite Recursion in JSON Serialization

πŸ‘€ Views: 47 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-08
spring jpa json jackson hibernate Java

I'm trying to debug I've been working on this all day and I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm confused about I'm working through a tutorial and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm working with a question where I'm using Spring Data JPA to fetch entities with `FetchType.EAGER`, and it's causing infinite recursion when I try to serialize the entities to JSON. I have an `Order` entity that has a bidirectional relationship with a `Customer` entity. When retrieving an `Order`, it eagerly fetches the associated `Customer`, but during JSON serialization using Jackson, I get a `StackOverflowError` because the `Customer` entity also references back to the `Order` entity. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```java @Entity public class Order { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; @ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.EAGER) private Customer customer; // getters and setters } @Entity public class Customer { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "customer") private List<Order> orders; // getters and setters } ``` When I call `orderRepository.findById(someId)`, I get the following behavior: ``` java.lang.StackOverflowError: null ``` I've tried adding `@JsonManagedReference` and `@JsonBackReference` annotations to manage the serialization, but it doesn't seem to resolve the scenario. Here’s how I applied them: ```java @Entity public class Order { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; @ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.EAGER) @JsonBackReference private Customer customer; // getters and setters } @Entity public class Customer { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "customer") @JsonManagedReference private List<Order> orders; // getters and setters } ``` This still leads to recursion issues since the `@JsonBackReference` annotation is not effectively preventing the infinite loop. Is there a better way to handle this situation without changing the fetch type to `LAZY`, which I understand can lead to other issues with Hibernate? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Any help would be greatly appreciated! This is for a service running on Ubuntu 22.04. Is there a better approach? What would be the recommended way to handle this? This is happening in both development and production on Debian. Any feedback is welcome! Thanks in advance!