Need suggestions for handling many-to-many relationships in Spring/JPA
I have two tables, playlist and tracks, which have a many-to-many relationship modeled as shown in the diagram.
I want to create an endpoint to get all the tracks in a playlist. E.g: (keeping response relevant to these 2 tables)
{
"playlist_id": ...,
"title": ...,
"cover_art": ...,
"tracks": [
{
"track_id": ...,
"title": ...
},
{
"track_id": ...,
"title": ...
}
]
}
These three tables each have their own repository and entity model implemented using JPA mappings (currently only OneToOne and ManyToOne, as shown in the diagram).
I’m trying to figure out the cleanest and most maintainable way to fetch this data without turning the codebase into a mess. At the moment, I’m using a JDBC join query inside PlaylistTrackRepository to directly return the DTO I need, but I’m wondering if there’s a better approach.
A few things I’d really appreciate guidance on:
- Is decomposing a many-to-many relationship like this a good design choice in the first place?
- Would it be better to rely more on JPA relationships and projections instead of manual JDBC joins?
- Or should I avoid complex JPA mappings altogether and handle these queries with JDBC/native SQL instead?
I’m fairly new to the Spring ecosystem and backend development in general, and I’m currently trying to learn as much as I can about building backend systems properly. I’d really appreciate any guidance, corrections, suggestions, or best practices you can share. Thank you in advance for your patience and help!