Limitations

These are intentional non-goals of Sprout 1.x, not bugs. Some may be addressed in future versions.

No @EmbeddedId support

Entities with composite primary keys via @EmbeddedId are not supported. Sprout’s ID resolution logic handles single-field identifiers only. Using @EmbeddedId on an entity annotated with @SproutResource causes a compilation error with a descriptive message.

Workaround: Use a surrogate single-column primary key for the entity if you need Sprout to manage it.

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No paging, sorting, or filtering

Generated GET /api/{resource} returns the full collection. Sprout does not generate Page<T> return types, Pageable parameters, query-by-example, or any filtering layer.

Workaround: Override findAll() in a custom service bean (see Customization) and implement paging/filtering there, using Spring Data’s built-in Pageable support.

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Naive path pluralization

The default path derivation appends a literal s: Book → /api/books, Category → /api/categorys (wrong).

Workaround: Always set path explicitly for entities with irregular plurals:

@SproutResource(path = "/api/categories")
public class Category { ... }

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Shallow update (copies all properties except "id")

The default update implementation uses:

BeanUtils.copyProperties(entity, existing, "id");

This is a shallow, field-name-based copy. It does not support:

• Partial updates (PATCH semantics): all non-null and null fields are overwritten.
• DTO mapping: the request body is expected to be the entity type itself.
• Safe handling of non-"id" identifiers: if the identifier field is not literally named id, the copy will overwrite it — see the caveat in ID Resolution.

Workaround: Override update(...) in a custom service bean for any entity where the default behavior is insufficient.

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No relationship management

Sprout generates flat CRUD for a single entity. It does not handle:

• Nested resource creation (POST /api/books/{id}/chapters)
• Cascade updates across associations
• DTO projection to hide or reshape related entities

Workaround: Implement nested-resource or relationship logic manually in a separate controller and/or by overriding service methods.