spring-roo 2.0 Spring Webflow Persistence Best Practise

Question

I am having troubles with persisting an entity in a web flow with Spring Roo 2.0.0.RC2.

With Roo 2.0, I have generated an application which shall register a user at the end of a webflow.

Here are my roo commands:

    entity jpa --class ~.model.AppUser --serializable 
    field string --fieldName username --notNull
    web flow --flowName registrationProcess --class ~.RegistrationProcessFormBean`

This is my flow.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<flow xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" start-state="create-appuser" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow/spring-webflow-2.4.xsd">

    <persistence-context />

    <on-start>
        <set name="flowScope.registrationProcessFormBean" value="new de.xx.www.training.RegistrationProcessFormBean()"/>
        <set name="flowScope.appUser" value="new de.xx.www.training.model.AppUser()"/>
    </on-start>
    
    <view-state id="create-appuser" model="appUser" view="registrationprocess/create-appuser">
     <transition on="success" to="end-state" />
    </view-state> 

    <end-state id="end-state" view="registrationprocess/end-state" commit="true"/>
 
</flow>

Note: I am aware that it is better to use a dto instead of an entity. Currently, I am just trying to find a simple way to persist the entity AppUser.

My questions:

1. How to persist the entity? Is it possible to use the generated repository, e.g. AppUserRepository? (It is not serializable.)
2. If needed, how to configure HibernateFlowExecutionListener in flowRegistry in Roo 2.0?

Please advise. Thanks in advance!

Update 02/05/2019

I did as suggested.

<on-start>
<set name="flowScope.appUser" value="new de.test.model.AppUser()"/>

</on-start>
<!-- A sample view state -->
<view-state id="view-state-1" model="appUser" view="registrationprocess/view-state-1">
    <transition on="success" to="view-state-2">
    <evaluate expression="appUserServiceImpl.save(appUser)" result="flowScope.appUser" />
</transition>
</view-state>

Result:

org.springframework.expression.spel.SpelEvaluationException: EL1004E:(pos 19): Method call: Method save(de.test.model.AppUser) cannot be found on de.test.service.impl.AppUserServiceImpl$$EnhancerBySpringCGLIB$$10b2028b type

What am I doing wrong?

The method exists.

public class AppUserServiceImpl implements AppUserService {

 public AppUser save(AppUser entity) {
    return getAppUserRepository().save(entity);
}

Thank you for some hints.

Update 02/06/2019

As a work around, I disabled spring-boot-devtools in pom.xml (see https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/7912).

Answer 1

First define your entities and generate repository and service layers :

entity jpa --class ~.model.MyBean --serializable
repository jpa --all --package ~.repository
service --all --apiPackage ~.service.api --implPackage ~.service.impl

Now your service bean (myBeanServiceImpl) is available in the context.

You can use it to save your entity as follow in your flow:

<view-state id="view-state-1" view="gocluster/view-state-1" model="basics">
    <transition on="success" to="view-state-2">
      <evaluate expression="myBeanServiceImpl.save(basics)" result="flowScope.someObjectData" />
    </transition>
</view-state>