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SETUP

At present I have a controller heavy spring MVC application. Its components are heavily guarded with spring security. Most of the datamodel fetching, form binding etc... is done within controllers.

I however see great value addition in using spring web flow.

However I would like to use web flow in a specific way.

  • First of all I would like the web flow to be like traffic police directing web requests to appropriate controllers inside every state (Along with form binding objects, request, session params etc...).
  • I would like the controller to ultimately determine direction of web flow like successful login or goto registration page. However it is web flow that will consume the decision and facilitate the transition to the next state.
  • This next state will in turn leverage mvc by invoking appropriate controllers.

This way spring web flow is just like a facilitator and does not contain too much decision making logic & business logic invocation calls.

This is important for me since controllers can get heavy with respect to services it invokes and can potentially invoke them in a multi-threaded approach. All this cannot be done in spring web flow definitions

QUESTION

My question is very simple and basic. Is Spring Web Flow designed to perform like this on top of Spring MVC?

Is it possible to designate just this traffic regulation and state flow functionality to web flow while preserving most of the control and service invocation logic inside the controller?

--Am I understanding anything wrong here? I want to get these questions cleared before embarking along this path.

JasonMArcher
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Ace
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  • I think you got a -1 from somebody because SO's spring-webflow tag is usually used for code based questions, but this is a design question. – Software Engineer Apr 29 '14 at 14:18

1 Answers1

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This may be a little late for you, but I'm not sure webflow will give you exactly what you want to achieve. You want a router, and that's not really what webflow was designed for. Webflow is used more for multi-page form type flows, and using it for much more risks running into the limitations of the framework. Webflow cannot be used to intercept all web requests -- only those initiated through the flow mechanism, and it has very strong opinions on what state transition is (for example, form/bean validation is the default, although it can be overridden if required).

It's not that it can't be used as a router, it's just that it's not designed for this so you're likely to find impedance from its form based design goals.

Software Engineer
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