Default handler mapping for annotation based spring project

Question

I am new to spring framework. Even I dont have any deep concept about annotation. I am developing a very small application using spring mvc 3 framework and also I used annotation. I have a confusion. I have one spring-servlet.xml. Here I have not defined any handler mapping. But still it is working. So must be there some default handler mapping. Can you please let me what is this default handler mapping and how I can override it so that I do some customization.

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

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It is all explained in: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-config

Also see this question: How to use default-servlet-handler and Where to put default-servlet-handler in Spring MVC configuration

edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

Community

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answered May 29 '13 at 12:23

Zilvinas

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 11 '14 at 14:46

0

Spring 3.1 and later doesnt need DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping and AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter declaration in the [servelt-name]-servlet.xml

answered Mar 11 '14 at 14:46

vinay

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 05 '18 at 10:29

These links might help:

Spring Controller to handle all requests not matched by other Controllers

https://dzone.com/articles/using-the-spring-requestmapping-annotation

I had the same problem that I just resolved so I have confirmed the approach below works, although this is with annotations rather than an XML configuration.

You specify URL prefixes at the controller class level and include a request mapping annotation for ** to ensure you match on anything that falls through your other handlers for this class. There's really nothing special or default about this handler other than the fact that you're defining a handler that is guaranteed to match everything under the class level mappings.

Note: This is not magic. Your handlers are still subject to Spring's ordering algorithm regarding the "best match". It would be nice to have an annotation providing for a true default when nothing else matches handler, especially in cases with complex mappings where "**" is useful outside of this catch-all handler. The basic implementation is:

@RestController
@RequestMapping(value={"/path1/","/path2/"})
public class MyRestController {

    @RequestMapping("/subpath")
    String matchedRequestHandler () {
        return "This matches /path1/subpath and /path2/subpath.";
    }

    @RequestMapping("**")
    String unmatchedRequestsHandler () {
        return "This matches everything else.";
    }

}

In my actual use case, I needed to handle arbitrary paths to resources inside of the URL pattern and therefore needed to support a variable number of directories. Ideally, that would be handled using a pattern such as:

"/base/{optionaldir}/**/{entityName}/{describeVar:describe.json}"

which works fine by itself, but it isn't compatible with a default handler bound to "**" since the "**" mapping is calculated by Spring as a better match for these types of requests.

Instead, I had to add a bunch of separate entries to my request mapping to support the arbitrary paths within the URL pattern, e.g.

value={"/base/{optionaldir}/{entityName}/{describeVar:describe.json}",
       "/base/{optionaldir}/*/{entityName}/{describeVar:describe.json}",
       "/base/{optionaldir}/*/*/{entityName}/{describeVar:describe.json}",
       "/base/{optionaldir}/*/*/*/{entityName}/{describeVar:describe.json}"
}

Alternatively, I could have handled everything with a "**" mapping and parsed the URL myself, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using request mappings with path variables. Hopefully Spring's capabilities will evolve in this area in the future.

Default handler mapping for annotation based spring project

3 Answers3