(Workaround for) Use of @ConditionalOnProperty on Entity

Question

We have a Spring-Boot application with some database-entity-classes.

We use ddl-auto: validate to make sure the connected database has correct schema.

Now we are at the point where we add a feature which is toggle-able to match different environments, the NewFeatureService is annotated with @ConditionalOnProperty("newfeature.enabled").

Everything works fine until here.

The problem is that the feature requires a database entity.

@Entity
@ConditionalOnProperty("newfeature.enabled")  // <--- doesn't work
public class NewFeatureEnitity{...}

@ConditionalOnProperty will obviously not work but what is a good way to tell Hibernate only to validate this Entity against the database if a property is set.

What we don't want:

• add this table in all databases even if feature isn't used
• having different artifacts

Answer 1

Just to be sure that it's not overseen i want to provide my suggestion as an answer.

It makes a bit more use of spring-boot than the answer provided by O.Badr.

You could configure your spring-boot application to only scan your core entities like this:

@SpringBootApplication
@EntityScan("my.application.core")
public class Application {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

So you are able to provide your optional entities (and features) in a package like my.application.features (feel free to use any other structure but a package outside the previously specified base package).

@ConditionalOnProperty("newfeature.enabled")
@Configuration
@EntityScan("my.application.features.thefeature")
public class MyFeatureConfiguration {
  /*
  * No Configuration needed for scanning of entities. 
  * Do here whatever else should be configured for this feature.
  */
}