Use part of the URL as an argument to a controller in Spring MVC

Question

For example, with the URL

foo.com/bar/99

99 will be available directly to a method in the controller as an argument. The controller is mapped to /bar

For anyone familiar with ASP.NET MVC or Django, this would be similar to routes.MapRoute in the former and using (?P\d+) in urlpatterns in the latter.

It would be possible to process the data in the Http Request object directly to get this, but I'd like to know if Spring MVC has built-in support for this (particularly version 2.5).

Answer 1

No, Spring does not support this out of the box. You can, however, map path to method name using @RequestMapping and appropriately configured InternalPathMethodNameResolver:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/bar/*")
public class MyController {
  ...
  public String do99(HttpServletRequest request) {
    ...
  }
}

You'll have to specify prefix for InternalPathMethodNameResolver as "do" for the above to work since method names can't begin with digit. If you were to use "foo.com/bar/baz" as URL and call your method baz, no additional configuration would be necessary.

If you don't want to use method name mapping, getting '99' as parameter is as easy as grabbing it from request.getPathInfo() in your method.

Answer 2

For anyone using Spring 3, I've learned this can be done using the new @PathVairable annotation

Here's the example from http://blog.springsource.com/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/

@RequestMapping("/hotels/{hotelId}")
public String getHotel(@PathVariable String hotelId, Model model) {
    List<Hotel> hotels = hotelService.getHotels();
    model.addAttribute("hotels", hotels);
    return "hotels";
}

Answer 3

Hi what if you just wanted a URL like: abcc.com/hello abcc.com/mikey

how could I have a generic controller (apart from all the other ones that actually map to something i.e. abcc.com/register)??

so in other words, I believe the generic could always be called... if "hello" exists in the app, then it would forward to the hello page but if it didnt, it would give a 404 error or something. How can this be done.... same idea as twitter ie..twitter.com/justin

thanks