You could do this in two ways through Spring. I tested the instructions below in Spring 2.1.7.
With just a @Document class, Spring will not create a collection in Mongo. It will however create a collection if you do the following:
You have a field you want to index in the collection, and you annotate it as such in the Java class. E.g.
@Indexed(unique = true)
private String indexedData;
Create a repository for the collection:
public interface MyClassRepository extends MongoRepository<MyClass, String> {
}
If you don't need/want an index, the second way of doing this would be to add some code that runs at startup, adds a dummy value in the collection and deletes it again.
@Configuration
public class LoadDatabase {
@Bean
CommandLineRunner initDb(MyClassRepository repository) {
// create an instance of your @Document annotated class
MyClass myDocument = new MyClass();
myDocument = repository.insert(myDocument);
repository.delete(myDocument);
}
}
Make sure your document class has a field of the correct type (String by default), annotated with @Id, to map Mongo's _id field.