URI/URL Related Improvement Suggestions for RequestMapping in Spring MVC [SPR-7585]

[spring-projects-issues]

Doug Gschwind opened SPR-7585 and commented

The RequestMapping annotation does a great job of helping the reader of a Spring MVC Controller understand which method(s) on that Controller will be invoked given a URI such as "/account", the HTTP method (e.g. GET or POST), as well as given the presence/absence of certain identified HTTP request parameters.

I believe this implementation suffers from the following though, and hence could be improved to address these concerns :

1. These URIs embedded in a Spring MVC Controller are the source of Don't Repeat Yourself violations since that same URI has to be repeated elsewhere in say a JSP that has a hyperlink or a button that intends to invoke a given method on a given type of Controller when the hyperlink or button is clicked upon.
2. Spring MVC does not appear to have a facility to be able to generate a URL in say a JSP, that intends to invoke a given method on a given type of Controller. This is closely related to the first item.
3. By having these URIs sprinkled throughout your Spring MVC Controller classes, you have a little bit of research to do if you plan to introduce a new Controller that should have a distinct URI that it responds to. A text search through the source files would solve that problem, but that is slow and error prone. I understand the Spring MVC plugin for Eclipse has some support for this, but once again requires the human eye to review all the existing URIs to determine if there exists a collision or partial URI match of some sort.

I have tried to solve one and two by placing information in the Spring MVC descriptor, but that involves interrogating the ApplicationContext, and of course, my own custom code. I would like the framework to provide this support for me, so that I have to specify a URI for a Controller and Method, once and only once. If that were possible, I could make a URI change in one place, and the app would continue to run fine (assuming that change introduced no [partial] collisions) without any further effort.

Thank you,

Doug Gschwind

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Affects: 3.0 GA

Issue Links:

• Allow links to @Controller methods from views without hardcoding URLs [SPR-5779] #10449 Allow links to @Controller methods from views without hardcoding URLs ("duplicates")

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

The RequestMappingHandlerMapping in Spring 3.1 makes it easy to build the request mappings from any source. We are planning to make some further improvements along these lines in Spring 3.2 (see #10427, #10449).