Conventionally, a GET request is used when you wish to GET information from the database. Similarly, a POST request is used when we wish to create new information in the database.

With Spring Data JPA’s CrudRepository, you can use the .save() method to create records in the database. The .save() method accepts your model as a parameter, and uses all the annotations you added to indicate the columns as its basis when it uses the ORM to create the underlying SQL INSERT statement.

Once again, we’ll refer to the Person example:

@PostMapping("/people")
public Person createNewPerson(@RequestBody Person person) {
  Person newPerson = this.personRepository.save(person);
  return newPerson;
}

In this example, the end user of the API would pass in a Person using the body of their POST request. To save this person to our database, we use the .save method from the PersonRepository. The .save method returns a Person as well, and the only difference between this newPerson and the original person passed by the user is that the newPerson will have an id field, generated by means of the @GeneratedValue annotation from the model definition.

Lastly, this newPerson is returned in the response body, so that the end user can know the ID that was assigned to the new entry they created in the database.

Now, let’s do something similar for our plants application.