[Use Case]: Statically specify First/Limit at dev time so that singular return type can be valid on methods

[njr-11]

As a ...

• Application user/user of the configuration itself
• API user (application developer)
• SPI user (container or runtime developer)
• Specification implementer

I need to be able to ...

statically specify a limit at development time

Which enables me to ...

write a repository method with a singular return type (Optional<MyEntity> or MyEntity).

Additional information

This is currently only possible (and awkwardly so) with Query by Method Name.

To allow it with @Query and parameter based queries (@Find), we can add First (proposed by Gavin in #530 (comment))

@Find @First
@OrderBy(value = _Employee.SALARY, descending = true)
@OrderBy(value = _Employee.ID)
Optional<Employee> highestPaid(String jobTitle);

The value would default to 1.

Reminder to update recommendations in NonUniqueResultException once we have this.

This is being proposed for after Jakarta Data version 1.0.

[gavinking]

@njr-11 @otaviojava do you think we should scope this for 1.1?

I think we should discuss it at least.

[njr-11]

@njr-11 @otaviojava do you think we should scope this for 1.1?

I think we should discuss it at least.

I agree with including it. It would be easy to add and is useful.

[njr-11]

Reopening. TCK is still needed.

[gavinking]

@njr-11 I was wondering if it would be better to track the TCK work in the TCK issue, rather than leaving lots of issues open.

[gavinking]

@njr-11 I was wondering if it would be better to track the TCK work in the TCK issue, rather than leaving lots of issues open.

[njr-11]

@njr-11 I was wondering if it would be better to track the TCK work in the TCK issue, rather than leaving lots of issues open.

That would be fine with me. It wasn't listed there, but I just added it. In the case of this particular issue, the API work wasn't actually done yet either because there is also the part in the issue description about updating the text of NonUniqueResultException. I just created #1031 to do that. After that, I think we can close this.