Is it possible to run code before Spring Framework controller method is called?

Question

I'm creating menu and I would like to link my menu items to Spring controller paths. One way to do this is to include menu code to all methods that contain @RequestMapping annotations, but it would be manual task, I would like to automate this task, so that I could just define menu bean and add menu in site template and menus would be generated automatically for every path.

Answer 1

It doesn't have to be a manual task. You can easily add menu code to all methods that contain @RequestMapping annotations by using AOP. Here are the docs http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/aop.html

Answer 2

SpringMVC Interceptors might be a bit easier than the straight AOP above.

• Spring Reference
• Sample Config

Note: This approach does couple the code a bit more to Spring MVC, but it'd be an easy port to a similar interception/aspect application in any other framework