POSTing to a collection association using Spring Data Rest

I find it difficult to create a collection to which I can POST. I have two objects, Device and Group, that have a many-to-many relationship. so a device can be in zero or more groups, and a group can contain zero or more Devices.

I can create new Device and Group objects by POSTing to / api / devices and / api / groups /. From my reading of the docs in the device, there should be a RestResource in the device collection that represents the collection of groups the device is a member of (ie. / Api / devices / {deviceId} / groups. This is an "association resource" and since this is an instance Set<Group>

I would think that it is treated as a collection association. I can get and PUT uri-list

to this association, but when I post I get a 404.

The list can get quite large and I would like to be able to post a new collection association link without downloading the whole thing or changing it.

the documenation says this should be supported, but I had no luck.

Any suggestions will be highly appreciated.

These domain classes are defined as:

@Entity
public class Device {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    private String name;

    @ManyToMany(targetEntity = Group.class, cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
    private Set<Group> groups;

    // getters, setters
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

and,

@Entity(name="device_groups")
public class Group {
    @Id @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    private String name;

    @ManyToMany(mappedBy = "groups")
    private Set<Device> devices;

    // getters, setters
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

Each has a repository declared:

public interface DeviceRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Device, Long> {
}

public interface GroupRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Group, Long> {        
}