Stop Writing CRUD Screens in Spring Boot

Prashant Thorat — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:05:02 +0000

Every Spring Boot project seems to start the same way.

You create a few JPA entities:

@Entity
public class Customer {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    private String firstName;

    private String lastName;

    private String email;
}

Then you create repositories:

public interface CustomerRepository
        extends JpaRepository<Customer, Long> {
}

And then the real work begins.

You spend days building:

Tables
Search screens
Create forms
Edit forms
Relationship dropdowns
Validation screens
React components The frustrating part?

None of this work is unique to your business.

It’s repetitive CRUD development.

After doing this repeatedly across multiple projects, I decided to build an open-source tool that generates these screens automatically.

The Problem
Most business applications contain a large amount of administrative functionality.

Examples include:

Customer Management
Product Catalogs
Vendor Management
Employee Records
Exchange Rates
Beneficiary Management
Master Data Tables

In many projects, developers spend more time building CRUD screens than implementing actual business logic.

For startups and internal tools, this is often unnecessary.

My Goal
I wanted a solution where developers only need:

A JPA Entity
A Spring Repository and immediately receive a working management UI.

Something like:

@Entity
public class Customer {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    private String firstName;

    private String lastName;

    private String email;
}

@RepositoryRestResource
public interface CustomerRepository
extends JpaRepository {
}

Run the application and instantly get:

List View
Create Form
Edit Form
Delete Operations
Relationship Handling
without writing React CRUD pages.

**Introducing Spring Data Entry
**Spring Data Entry is an open-source project that generates business management screens from Spring Data REST repositories.

The project consists of:
Backend
Spring Boot library that discovers:

Entities
Repositories
Metadata
Relationships
and exposes everything through Spring Data REST.

Frontend
React-based UI that automatically generates:

Tables
Forms
Relationship selectors
Navigation
based on the backend metadata.

Features
Current capabilities include:

✅ Dynamic entity discovery

✅ Automatic form generation

✅ Spring Data REST integration

✅ OneToOne relationship support

✅ ManyToOne relationship support

✅ React-based UI

✅ Minimal setup

**Example Use Cases
**Internal Admin Portals
Manage:

Customers
Employees
Vendors
Products
without building custom screens.

Fintech Back Office Systems
Coming from a fintech background, I repeatedly encountered the need to manage:

Beneficiaries
Exchange Rates
Agents
Branches
Compliance Reference Data Most of these screens are essentially CRUD operations.

Spring Data Entry can generate them automatically.

Master Data Management
Many organizations maintain hundreds of lookup and reference tables.

Instead of creating individual admin screens for every table, developers can expose them through Spring Data Entry.

Why Open Source?
I believe internal tooling is still unnecessarily expensive.

Many teams either:

Build everything from scratch
Use spreadsheets
Purchase expensive low-code platforms
I wanted to create a developer-friendly alternative for the Spring ecosystem.

Open source allows developers to:

Evaluate freely
Contribute features
Customize behavior
Deploy anywhere

Current Limitations
The project is still evolving.

Areas I plan to improve include:

Server-side pagination
Advanced search
Role-based access control
Audit trails
Workflow approvals
Multi-tenant support

Roadmap
My vision is to evolve Spring Data Entry from a CRUD generator into a platform for building internal business applications.

Future features include:

Maker-checker workflows
Approval processes
Audit logging
Enterprise security
SaaS deployment options

Try It Out
GitHub repositories:

Frontend:
https://github.com/pat246/data-entry

Backend:
https://github.com/pat246/spring-data-entry

Demo videos:

Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hMOjydgdeM

Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xZPJCJBg-M

Final Thoughts
Most developers don’t enjoy building CRUD screens.

We build them because business applications require them.

My goal with Spring Data Entry is simple:

Spend less time building admin screens and more time building business value.

If you’re a Spring Boot developer, I’d love your feedback, ideas, and contributions.

DEV Community: Prashant Thorat

Stop Writing CRUD Screens in Spring Boot