When dealing with role-based request mappings in a Spring Boot application, the best practice is to create separate controllers for each user role, each with its own set of request mappings and controller methods. This approach keeps the codebase clean, organized, and maintainable. Option 2 is the recommended approach, as it follows the principle of separation of concerns. The other options may lead to complex and hard-to-maintain code.

In Spring Security, the primary interface used for authentication and authorization is the AuthenticationProvider. It's responsible for authenticating users based on provided credentials and creating an Authentication object that represents the authenticated user. While UserDetails is important for user details, PasswordEncoder handles password encoding, and RoleProvider is not a standard Spring Security interface.

The @Transactional annotation in Spring Data JPA is used to define transaction boundaries for the annotated method. It ensures that the method is executed within a transaction, and any changes made to the database are either committed or rolled back as a single unit of work. The other options do not accurately describe the purpose of @Transactional in Spring Data JPA.

To implement password rotation while maintaining security, you should follow best practices like using a strong hashing algorithm, enforcing a secure password policy, and implementing a scheduled task to rotate passwords. Storing expiration dates in plaintext or using weak hashing would compromise security.

If you want to specify that a configuration will be applied only if a specific class is present, you would use the @ConditionalOnClass annotation in Spring Boot. This annotation allows you to conditionally apply a configuration based on the presence of a specified class in the classpath. It helps in creating flexible and conditional configurations.

To optimize the performance of Spring Data JPA repositories when dealing with large datasets, it's crucial to write custom queries using the @Query annotation. This allows you to fine-tune the SQL queries and fetch only the necessary data, minimizing the overhead of retrieving large datasets. Other options may be relevant in different contexts, but they do not directly address the issue of optimizing performance with large datasets.

In Spring Boot, you can optimize configuration loading during testing by using the @Profile annotation in test classes. This allows you to specify which profiles should be active during testing, overriding the application's default profile. Option (1) is not the preferred way for testing. Option (4) is incorrect as it is used to set the default profile, not for testing purposes. Option (3) is incorrect; profiles can indeed be optimized for testing.

In Spring Boot, you can use tools like Flyway or Liquibase to apply data migration scripts. These tools help manage database schema changes and versioning, ensuring that your application's database is kept in sync with the evolving data structure required by your application's code. The choice between these tools often depends on your team's preferences and project requirements.

In Spring, the @Autowired annotation is used to automate the wiring of bean dependencies. When applied to fields, constructors, or methods, it allows Spring to automatically inject the appropriate beans or dependencies, making the code more readable and reducing the need for manual wiring.

In Spring Boot, MockMvc is commonly used for simulating HTTP requests when testing RESTful APIs. It provides a powerful and expressive API for testing Spring MVC controllers.