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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.

Instructions

Create a public method in the PlantController that can accept a Plant plant and save it using the plantRepository field. Call this method createNewPlant. Don’t add any of the Spring annotations just yet. After saving the plant, this method should return the newPlant that is created after .save is called.

Add the annotations that will attach this method as a handler to a POST request made to "/plants". Additionally, add the annotation required to make Spring Boot check the request body for the plant passed by the user in their request.

You’re ready to test out your new method! Use curl to make a POST request to this new endpoint, passing in all the required parameters for creating a record in the PLANTS database.

Remember, you won’t have to pass an id, as that will be automatically generated with our @GeneratedValue annotation on that field. For the rest of the parameters, check your Plant.java file to see what fields are expected for this model.

If you got a response body back with a new id, then your code to create a new Plant entry in the PLANTS database worked!

Validate this again by hitting the GET endpoints you created. Using either the web browser pane or curl, ensure that your GET /plants and GET /plants/{id} endpoints both reflect that a new entry was created.

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