Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

>> GET THE COURSE
Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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1. Overview

While Spring Data JPA can abstract the creation of queries to retrieve entities from the database in specific situations, we sometimes need to customize our queries, such as when we add aggregation functions.

In this tutorial, we’ll focus on how to convert the results of those queries into an object. We’ll explore two different solutions, one involving the JPA specification and a POJO, and another using Spring Data Projection.

2. JPA Queries and the Aggregation Problem

JPA queries typically produce their results as instances of a mapped entity. However, queries with aggregation functions normally return the result as Object[].

To understand the problem, let’s define a domain model based on the relationship between posts and comments:

@Entity
public class Post {
    @Id
    private Integer id;
    private String title;
    private String content;
    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "post")
    private List comments;

    // additional properties
    // standard constructors, getters, and setters
}

@Entity
public class Comment {
    @Id
    private Integer id;
    private Integer year;
    private boolean approved;
    private String content;
    @ManyToOne
    private Post post;

    // additional properties
    // standard constructors, getters, and setters
}

Our model defines that a post can have many comments, and each comment belongs to one post. Let’s use a Spring Data Repository with this model:

@Repository
public interface CommentRepository extends JpaRepository<Comment, Integer> {
    // query methods
}

Now let’s count the comments grouped by year:

@Query("SELECT c.year, COUNT(c.year) FROM Comment AS c GROUP BY c.year ORDER BY c.year DESC")
List<Object[]> countTotalCommentsByYear();

The result of the previous JPA query can’t be loaded into an instance of Comment because the result is a different shape. The year and COUNT specified in the query don’t match our entity object.

While we can still access the results in the general-purpose Object[] returned in the list, doing so will result in messy, error-prone code.

3. Customizing the Result With Class Constructors

The JPA specification allows us to customize results in an object-oriented fashion. Therefore, we can use a JPQL constructor expression to set the result:

@Query("SELECT new com.baeldung.aggregation.model.custom.CommentCount(c.year, COUNT(c.year)) "
  + "FROM Comment AS c GROUP BY c.year ORDER BY c.year DESC")
List<CommentCount> countTotalCommentsByYearClass();

This binds the output of the SELECT statement to a POJO. The class specified needs to have a constructor that matches the projected attributes exactly, but it’s not required to be annotated with @Entity.

We can also see that the constructor declared in the JPQL must have a fully qualified name:

package com.baeldung.aggregation.model.custom;

public class CommentCount {
    private Integer year;
    private Long total;

    public CommentCount(Integer year, Long total) {
        this.year = year;
        this.total = total;
    }
    // getters and setters
}

4. Customizing the Result With Spring Data Projection

Another possible solution is to customize the result of JPA queries with Spring Data Projection. This functionality allows us to project query results with considerably less code.

4.1. Customizing the Result of JPA Queries

To use interface-based projection, we must define a Java interface composed of getter methods that match the projected attribute names. Let’s define an interface for our query result:

public interface ICommentCount {
    Integer getYearComment();
    Long getTotalComment();
}

Now let’s express our query with the result returned as List<ICommentCount>:

@Query("SELECT c.year AS yearComment, COUNT(c.year) AS totalComment "
  + "FROM Comment AS c GROUP BY c.year ORDER BY c.year DESC")
List<ICommentCount> countTotalCommentsByYearInterface();

To allow Spring to bind the projected values to our interface, we need to give aliases to each projected attribute with the property name found in the interface.

Spring Data will then construct the result on-the-fly, and return a proxy instance for each row of the result.

4.2. Customizing the Result of Native Queries

We can face situations where JPA queries aren’t as fast as native SQL, or can’t use specific features of our database engine. To solve this, we’ll use native queries.

One advantage of interface-based projection is that we can use it for native queries. Let’s use ICommentCount again and bind it to a SQL query:

@Query(value = "SELECT c.year AS yearComment, COUNT(c.*) AS totalComment "
  + "FROM comment AS c GROUP BY c.year ORDER BY c.year DESC", nativeQuery = true)
List<ICommentCount> countTotalCommentsByYearNative();

This works identically to JPQL queries.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we evaluated two different solutions to address mapping the results of JPA Queries with aggregation functions. First, we used the JPA standard involving a POJO class.

For the second solution, we used lightweight Spring Data projections with an interface. Spring Data projections allow us to write less code, both in Java and JPQL.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – LSD – NPI (cat=JPA)
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Get started with Spring Data JPA through the reference Learn Spring Data JPA:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)