Spring MVC 3.1 without annotations?

Question

I'm starting a new project with Spring 3.1, and have been eyeball deep in all the documentation and forum opinions about how to use the @Controller annotation.

I personally dislike using annotations for MVC; I much prefer having all the URLs of a webapp available in one place, using SimpleUrlHandlerMapping.

Also, from much previous work using Spring 2.x, I'm very used to the BaseCommandController heirarchy.

I've always loved Spring because it's empowering without being restricting. Now I find Spring MVC is forcing me to put URLs into the java source, meaning (a) I can't map a controller to several URLs, and (b) to discover what URLs are in use in a webapp, I have to scan through different java source files, which I find impractical.

What is the recommended way of combining @Controller with SimpleUrlHandlerMapping, please ?

Update:

Hi Dave, are you saying you can map multiple URLs like this (altered from petclini.web.ClinicController)?

@RequestMapping({"/vets", "/another"})
public ModelMap vetsHandler() {

If this works then good.

My question still stands though: If I don't want URLs in my java source, how best to map them with @Controller classes?

Regards,

I'm not aware you can't map multiple urls any more, do you have a doc reference for that? — Dave Newton, Apr 03 '12 at 11:54
Respond to comments by using @(user name) as a comment--if you ask someone a question embedded in your original question they may never see it. I'm asking *you* if it's changed, and if so, to provide a documentation link. Personally I'd use something like [this](https://github.com/bclozel/springmvc-router) for routing; I rolled my own, but apparently someone else did too. — Dave Newton, Apr 03 '12 at 12:37
@Dave Newton: thanks for the link, I'm going to look into that. (BTW: I replied in the question so I could format the code) — Stewart, Apr 03 '12 at 12:41
I understand the need for formatting, but if nobody sees it, it doesn't matter how nicely it's formatted :) Besides, for something that short, `@RequestMapping({"/url1", "/url2"})` is probably sufficient. — Dave Newton, Apr 03 '12 at 13:19
I've had a good play with that library now. At first I thought it was an excellent idea, to point of wanting to prompt you to making it a format answer, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to handle method level @ModelAttribute correctly, and thus my reference data is not getting populated. Shame. — Stewart, Apr 05 '12 at 14:08
Steward, the @ModelAttribute issue has been fixed : https://github.com/resthub/springmvc-router/issues/6 . I still have a little issue ( https://github.com/resthub/springmvc-router/issues/14 ) but it's not a show stopper for me. Note that I submitted a pull request to allow routing based on querystring parameters ( https://github.com/bclozel/springmvc-router/pull/1 ), if you need this feature. — electrotype, Jul 05 '12 at 15:59

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 21 '17 at 06:35

Here is a simple set up to support annotation and non-annotated controllers.

Dispatcher servlet configuration xml

<mvc:annotation-driven/>
<bean id="testController" class="com.test.web.TestController"/>
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.SimpleControllerHandlerAdapter"/>
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
  <property name="mappings">
      <value>
      /test=testController
      </value>
  </property>
  <property name="order" value="0"/>
</bean>

A simple URL mapped controller

public class TestController implements Controller {

    @Override
    public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
        PrintWriter responseWriter = response.getWriter();
        responseWriter.write("test");
        responseWriter.flush();
        responseWriter.close();
        return null;
    }
}

The controller for mvc annotation-config

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/home")
public class HomeController {

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ResponseBody
    public String dashboard(Model model, HttpServletRequest request) {
        return "home";
    }
}

If you want to use your own handlers for @Controller annotation. you can probably look into ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner and DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping.determineUrlsForHandlerMethods.

This looks valid, and I guess it's one way to go, but I was specifically asking about @Controller with SimpleUrlHandlerMapping, rather than the Controller interface - especially as many implementations of this interface are now deprecated. — Stewart, Jul 05 '12 at 13:04
Sounds like a plan to subclass: http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org.springframework/spring-webmvc/3.1.0.RELEASE/org/springframework/web/servlet/mvc/annotation/DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping.java#DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping.determineUrlsForHandler%28java.lang.String%29 Perhaps that's what springmvc-router was trying to do? — Stewart, Jul 05 '12 at 16:44

Spring MVC 3.1 without annotations?

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