Spring MVC - First Controller

In this post we are going to see how to write a simple controller in Spring using annotation support.

Step-1: Load Spring Servlet Context

First of all we have to declare the servlet of Spring that acts as a Front Controller. Besides we have to declare the URLs served by the DispatcherServlet.
web.xml

<web-app version="2.4" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xsi:schemalocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
    <display-name>SpringMVCExample</display-name>
   <servlet>
        <servlet-name>SpringMVCExample</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/spring-mvc.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
          <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
         <servlet-name>SpringMVCExample</servlet-name>
         <url-pattern>*.htm</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

Step-2: Create Controller class

In the following code there's a simple controller FirstController. The annotations involved in this class are:

• @Controller : tells Spring that this class is a Controller
• @RequestMapping on the class level means the controller serves the requests sent to this path: protocol://hostname:<port>/<context>/firstcontroller/
• @RequestMapping on the method level means that the method serves the requests sent to this path: protocol://hostname:<port>/<context>/firstcontroller/method1

FirstController.java

package com.simonefolinojavablog.spring.controller;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value="/firstcontroller")
public class FirstController {
 
 @RequestMapping("/method1")
 public String processRequestMethod1(){
  System.out.println("processRequestMethod1");
  return "example";
 }

 @RequestMapping("/method2")
 public String processRequestMethod2(){
  System.out.println("processRequestMethod2");
  return "example";
 }

}

Step-3: Spring Context Configuration

In the web.xml we have specified spring-mvc.xml as the configuration file. In spring-mvc.xml we specify that we are going to use annotation support and the package to search for annotation as @Service,@Controller etc...

• <context:annotation-config>:support to annotations
• <context:component-scan base-package="com.simonefolinojavablog.spring.controller">: search the annotations as @Service, @Controller
• InternalResourceViewResolver: special bean that makes possible to refer to Views using simply the name of JSP

spring-mvc.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<beans xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
 xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx.xsd
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop 
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop.xsd
                           ">

 <context:annotation-config />


 <context:component-scan base-package="com.simonefolinojavablog.spring.controller" />



 <bean id="viewResolver"
  class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="viewClass"
   value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
  <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/pages/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
 </bean>

</beans>

Step-4: Create a JSP to redirect the web flow

The method of the FirstController returns example that is the name of the JSP to put in the directory WEB-INF/pages/example.jsp
example.jsp

<html>
<head>
<title>Landing Page</title>
</head>

<body>Hi, your first controller works fine!

</body>


</html>

Step-5: Client

Now we have to call the web application at the link http://localhost/${context}/firstcontrollert/method1.htm or http://localhost/${context}/firstcontrollert/method2.htm.
The controller redirects the web flow to example.jsp and you can see processRequestMethod1 or processRequestMethod2 in the console, depending on which method has served the request.