On a GET call for an HTTP API usually clients would need the functionality to filter and sort by certain fields. First, let’s suppose you have the following entities: Person, Address and City. Let’s assume that one person can have many addresses, and each address can have one city. Using Spring Data’s PagingAndSortingRepository the service layer method would look something like this: @RequiredArgsContructor public class PersonService { @Autowired private PersonRepository personRepository; public List<PersonDto> findAll() { List<Person> persons = personRepository.