Static Data with Spring Boot

Sometimes we need some structured, static data in our application. Perhaps the static data is a workaround until we have built the full feature that stores the data in the database and allows users to maintain the data themselves. Or we just need a way to easily maintain and access rarely changing data without the overhead of storing it in a database.

Use cases might be:

• maintaining a large enumeration containing structured information that changes every once in a while - we don’t want to use enums in code because we don’t want to recompile the whole application for each change, or
• displaying static data in an application, like the name and address of the CEO in the letterhead of an invoice or a “Quote of the Day” on a web page, or
• using any structured data you can think of that you don’t want to maintain in code nor in the database.

With its @ConfigurationProperties feature, Spring Boot supports access to structured data from one or more configuration files.

In this article, we’ll have a look at:

• how to create a configuration file with the data,
• how to create an integration test that verifies the setup, and
• how to access the data in the application.

We’ll take the “Quote of the Day” use case as an example (I actually built that a couple weeks back as a farewell present to my previous team :)).

Example Code

Storing Static Data in a Config File

First, we create a YAML file quotes.yml that contains our static data:

static:
  quotes:
  - text: "A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it."
    author: "Albert Einstein"
  - text: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
    author: "Fred Brooks"

If you prefer properties files over YAML, you can use that instead. It’s just easier to represent nested data structures with YAML.

In our case, each quote has a text and an author. Each quote will later be represented in a Quote object.

Note that we prefixed the data with static:quotes. This is necessary to create a unique namespace because Spring Boot will later merge the content of this config file with the rest of its configuration.

Making Spring Boot Aware of the Config File

Now we have to make Spring Boot aware of this configuration file. We can do this by setting the system property spring.config.location each time we start the Spring Boot application:

-Dspring.config.location=./,./quotes.yml

This tells Spring Boot to search for an application.properties or application.yml file in the current folder (which is the default) and to additionally load the file quotes.yml.

This is all we need to do for Spring Boot to load our YAML file and expose the content within our application.

Accessing the Static Data

Now to the code.

First off, we need a Quote data structure that serves as a vessel for the configuration data:

@ConstructorBinding
class Quote {

    private final String text;
    private final String author;

    Quote(String text, String author) {
        this.text = text;
        this.author = author;
    }

    // getters and setters omitted

}

The Quote class only has simple String properties. If we have more complex data types, we can make use of custom converters that convert the configuration parameters (which are always Strings) to the custom types we need.

Note that Quotes are immutable, taking all their state in the constructor. Because of this, we need to add the @ConstructorBinding annotation to the class, telling Spring Boot to use the constructor for instantiation. Otherwise, we’ll get a binding error (see box below).

Next, we take advantage of Spring Boot’s @ConfigurationProperties feature to bind the static data to a QuotesProperties object:

@Component
@ConfigurationProperties("static")
public class QuotesProperties {

  private final List<Quote> quotes;

  public QuotesProperties(List<Quote> quotes) {
    this.quotes = quotes;
  }

  public List<Quote> getQuotes(){
    return this.quotes;
  }

}

This is where our namespace prefix comes into play. The QuotesProperties class is bound to the namespace static and the quotes prefix in the config file binds to the field of the same name.

Verifying Access to the Static Data

To test if our static data works as expected, we can create a simple integration test:

@SpringBootTest(
  properties = { "spring.config.location = ./,file:./quotes.yml" }
)
class QuotesPropertiesTest {

  @Autowired
  private QuotesProperties quotesProperties;

  @Test
  void staticQuotesAreLoaded() {
    assertThat(quotesProperties.getQuotes()).hasSize(2);
  }

}

The most important part of this test is setting the spring.config.location property to tell Spring Boot to pick up our quotes.yml file.

Then, we can simply inject the QuotesProperties bean and assert that it contains the quotes we expect.

Accessing the Static Data

Finally, having the QuotesProperties bean in place and tested, we can now simply inject it into any other bean to do whatever we need with our quotes. For instance, we can build a scheduler that logs a random quote every 5 seconds:

@Configuration
@EnableScheduling
public class RandomQuotePrinter {

  private static final Logger logger = 
    LoggerFactory.getLogger(RandomQuotePrinter.class);
  private final Random random = new Random();
  private final QuotesProperties quotesProperties;

  public RandomQuotePrinter(QuotesProperties quotesProperties) {
    this.quotesProperties = quotesProperties;
  }

  @Scheduled(fixedRate = 5000)
  void printRandomQuote(){
    int index = random.nextInt(quotesProperties.getQuotes().size());
    Quote quote = quotesProperties.getQuotes().get(index);
    logger.info("'{}' - {}", quote.getText(), quote.getAuthor());
  }
}

Conclusion

With @ConfigurationProperties, Spring Boot makes it easy to load configuration from external sources, especially from local configuration files. These files can contain custom complex data structures and thus are ideal for static data that we don’t want to maintain within our source code or the database.

You can find the code to this article on github.