Implementing hypermedia

We have learned about hypermedia and Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) in Chapter 1, RESTful Web Service Fundamentals. Spring provides state-of-the-art support to HATEOAS using the org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-hateoas dependency.

First of all, we need to make sure that all models returned as part of the API response contain the link field. There are different ways to associate links (that is, the org.springframework.hateoas.Link class) with models, either manually or via auto-generation. Spring HATEOAS's links and its attributes are implemented according to RFC 8288 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8288). For example, you can create a self-link manually as follows:

import static org.springframework.hateoas.server.mvc.      WebMvcLinkBuilder.linkTo;
import static org.springframework.hateoas.server.mvc.      WebMvcLinkBuilder.methodOn;
// other code blocks...