Problem with replacement of @DBRef to @DocumentReference

[ALGA0887]

Problem with replacement of @DBRef to @DocumentReference

[christophstrobl]

Thank you for reaching out!
@DocumentReference is no drop in replacement for @DBRef, but an alternative approach of storing references between documents. I'm not aware of any section in the reference documentation that would promote the given scenario to work out of the box. If so, please let us know so we can update that part to be more clear.

[ALGA0887]

Hello @christophstrobl!

Thank you for your answer!
Yes you are right: there is nothing directly about such replacement in the documentation.
Nevertheless it is not expected behavior that processing of such combination of annotations @DocumentReference and @ReadOnlyProperty on some field leads to loading of any data (in our case it is DBRef but in general it could be anything) from MongoDB during evaluation of Spel expression. With spring-data our schema is specified in java code and java code should have higher priority than data in MongoDB. In our code this field is not DBRef and should be ignored by default.

https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/mongodb/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/html/#mapping-usage.document-references
It is also possible to model relational style One-To-Many references using a combination of @ReadonlyProperty and @DocumentReference. This approach allows link types without storing the linking values within the owning document but rather on the referencing document as shown in the example below.

So there is expectation after reading of documentation above that combination of @ReadonlyProperty and @DocumentReference tells Mapping Framework just ignore data in this field in MongoDB. If we don't store anything in the field, why it is necessary to read anything from it? How we can ignore existing data in MongoDB then?