Spring MVC: disable DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping

Question

I'm using Spring MVC with <mvc:annotation-driven />

I've implemented my own mapping handler extending DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping, but I'm not sure how to use it. I've declared it like this:

<bean class="es.kcsolutions.boulevard.DispatcherMappingHandler" />

It works, but, obviously, DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping works too and always before mine. Is there a way to disable it and use only mine?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you take out any explicit declarations of the DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping then your custom mapper is supposed to replace it in the dispatcher. (according to javadoc) If you need/want more than one mapping, then you control them by setting their Order property. Lower order numbers execute first.

<bean class="es.kcsolutions.boulevard.DispatcherMappingHandler">
<property name="order" value="0"/>
</bean>

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping">
<property name="order" value="1"/>
</bean>

Answer 2

My advice would be to remove the <mvc:annotation-driven /> altogether. It doesn't really do anything particularly useful - most of the beans it declares are there already. And in cases where you want to declare your own handler mapping or handler adapter, it just gets in the way.

So take it out, declare your own DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping bean, and it should work. No need to mess about with ordering in 99.9% of cases.