On behalf of the team and everyone who has contributed, I’m delighted to announce the first milestone of the 2026.0.0 release train.

Support for Type-Safe Property Paths

We now support type-safe property paths and property references as initiative to reduce the need for stringly-typed programming when referring to properties within an entity.

Java variants:

PropertyPath.from("name", Person.class) // existing String-based API
PropertyPath.of(Person::getName) // type-safe property reference expression

PropertyPath.from("address.country", Person.class) // existing nested path API
PropertyPath.of(Person::getAddress).then(Address::getCountry) // type-safe composed path expression


PropertyReference.of(Secret::getSecret)

Kotlin variants:

PropertyReference.of(Secret::secret)

PropertyPath.of(Person::address / Address::city)

allowing type-safe usage through e.g.:

Sort.by(Person::getFirstName, Person::getLastName)

Type-Safe property-paths are available in Spring Data Commons 4.1 M1 and the following modules:

• Spring Data Cassandra through the Query, Criteria and Update API for type-safe query construction.
• Spring Data JDBC and R2DBC through the Criteria and Update API for type-safe query construction.
• Spring Data JPA through the Expressions utility for an improved CriteriaBuilder API usage experience.
• Spring Data MongoDB through the Query, Criteria and Update API for type-safe query construction.

Besides that, this milestone ships with enhancements, bugfixes, and dependency upgrades.

You can find more details in our Release Notes.

The upcoming Spring Boot 4.1 M2 milestone will pick up the release for your convenience by next week.

2026.0.0-M1

• Spring Data Commons 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data JPA 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data for Apache Cassandra 5.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Neo4j 8.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data KeyValue 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data MongoDB 5.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data LDAP 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data REST 5.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Redis 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Elasticsearch 6.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Couchbase 6.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog
• Spring Data Relational 4.1 M1 - Javadoc - Documentation - Changelog