(Fri Sep 01 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Error messages coming out of Spring can be more than inscrutable. In this case I'm defining a REST API using Swagger/OpenAPI targeting a Spring Boot implementation. The object models are complex, with lots of nested objects. It turns out you can POST a big blob of JSON with all kinds of structure, and Spring/JPA/Hibernate will swallow the whole thing and automatically parcel everything out to the corresponding database table. If you define the JPA annotations correctly, that is.
Get an annotation incorrect, and you'll be left scratching your head over what the heck you're being told by the error message. The Spring Team promises on a huge stack of bibles that Spring Boot automatically takes care of zillions of things for you, and it's so easy to write your code. In my experience it's instead a matter of papering complexity over complexity over a system containing about a thousand kitchen sinks worth of excess capabilities. There's no amount of papering-over that kind of complexity that will make the system simpler. But, the boss-man says to use Spring Boot, so here goes.
