Refactoring Charity Registration Application

🛠️ Goal

Refactor the existing Charity Registration application to leverage Spring Data JPA. This will improve maintainability, reduce boilerplate code, and ensure more efficient, declarative data access.

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✅ Objectives

• Migrate from manual JDBC or traditional JPA EntityManager-based queries to Spring Data JPA repositories.
• Use interface-based repository definitions for common CRUD operations.
• Implement custom queries using @Query annotations where necessary.
• Maintain separation of concerns between the service and data access layers.
• Preserve existing functionality for charity CRUD operations and file attachment management.

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🔁 Before Refactoring

Previously, the application used:

• Manually written SQL statements in DAO classes.
• Direct use of EntityManager or JdbcTemplate.
• Tedious boilerplate for basic operations like findById, save, or delete.

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🔁 After Refactoring

Using Spring Data JPA:

• Repositories extend JpaRepository<Charity, Long> or CrudRepository.
• Common methods like findAll(), save(), deleteById() are inherited.
• Custom finder methods like findByCharityName() or findByTaxId() can be declared using Spring Data conventions.
• Complex joins (e.g., Charity with associated Programs or Attachments) can be handled with @Query and JOIN FETCH.

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📦 Benefits

• Less boilerplate – no need to write CRUD SQL or manage transactions manually.
• Better testability – repository interfaces are easy to mock.
• Improved readability – business logic is no longer cluttered with persistence logic.
• Flexible queries – supports both derived query methods and JPQL/native queries.

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💡 Next Steps

We’ll begin by:

1. Creating repository interfaces such as CharityRepository, ProgramRepository, and RegistrationRepository.
2. Refactoring service classes to delegate persistence operations to these repositories.
3. Ensuring that integration with controllers and unit tests remains intact.