Spring Data Mongodb find by starts with

Question

I'm using Spring data with mongodb. I have a collection called place :

{ 
  "_id" : NumberLong(281469), 
  "_class" : "com.domain.Place", 
  "name" : "paris"
}

I want to get places starting with some String. In mongo console I could get the result using :

db.place.find({name : {$regex : /^par/, $options: 'i'}})

Using the spring data repositories I've tried this but always give an empty result:

@Query(value="{'name' : {$regex : ?0, $options: 'i'}}")
public Page<PlaceDetails> findByNameStartsWith(String name,Pageable pageable);

And in the call of the repository method, I make a concatenation this way :

repository.findByNameStartsWith("/^"+token+"/",new PageRequest(0,10));

while this repository method works :

@Query(value="{'name' : ?0}")
public Page<PlaceDetails> findByName(String name,Pageable pageable);

The class is declared this way :

@Document(collection="place")
public class PlaceDetails {
//...
}

Any idea why it doesn't work?

Answer 1

StartsWith automatically applies the necessary wrapping into a regex, so with your client code you effectively wrap it twice. If you think about it: with your approach, the client effectively has to know that the starts-with clause is implement with a regex, which would be leaking internals.

So a simple:

repository.findByNameStartsWith(token, new PageRequest(0,10));

should do the trick.