Best way to know if CrudRepository.deleteById deleted something

[KarlHakanNordgren]

Hi All! If there is no record with id0 as its id then crudRepository.deleteById(id0) will complete silently having done nothing. What is the best way to only delete if a record exists? Is the below performant?

if (crudRepository.existsById(id)) {
    crudRepository.deleteById(id)
} else { throw SomeException() }

[dstepanov]

You can create an alternative method Long removeById(Id) and it will return the number of records deleted.

[graemerocher]

one improvement to the docs would be to mention you can return a number which we don't see to mention

[dstepanov]

We should have some table with all possible method prefixes and return types

[KarlHakanNordgren]

Wait according to that I can do Long deleteById(Id). Is that correct?

[dstepanov]

You can if you don’t use one of the existing repositories that defines no return methods

[KarlHakanNordgren]

Ps. Thanks for the above. Worked very nicely!

[theMyth721]

Thank you but I am facing the same issue:

1. I can't find any such removeById method in any of the repositories
2. The deleteById just silently succeeds regardless of weather the record exists or not,
   For this i think I need to create a custom solution or it would take two queries to sort this unfortunately which is not an efficient solution.
   I cannot believe such a mature framework did not think of something as obvious as this, I cannot see the reason behind it

[dstepanov]

You can create a new interface and create a method there.

[theMyth721]

Yes, typically I will be creating my own implementations with my own stored procedures, but without that, the only way is with 2 queries to the database.
Thank you so much for getting back

[dstepanov]

There is a solution mentioned in this thread, you can add a new method to your repository Long removeById(Id) that one will return the number of rows affected, so you will know if the record is deleted. You can also define:

default void deleteByIdOrFail(Long id) {
   if (removeById(id) == 0) {
       throw ...
   }
}