How can I change the ordering of mapped URLs in Spring MVC?

Question

I'm running Spring MVC 3.x and I have one Controller with RequestMapping annotations (DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping) and I have one ServletForwardingController with some additional mappings via SimpleUrlHandlerMapping. When I boot up my application, I see the following:

...
13:24:17,747 INFO  [DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping] Mapped URL path [/{query}] onto handler [com.foo.controllers.BarController@1b20a36]
13:24:17,997 INFO  [SimpleUrlHandlerMapping] Root mapping to handler [org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ParameterizableViewController@598535]
13:24:18,044 INFO  [SimpleUrlHandlerMapping] Mapped URL path [/spring*.ftl] onto handler [org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ServletForwardingController@56eb62]
13:24:18,044 INFO  [SimpleUrlHandlerMapping] Mapped URL path [/shared-resources/**] onto handler [org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ServletForwardingController@56eb62]
...

My BarController is of course catching all requests (like /spring_en_US.ftl), but I want it to be tried last. In other words, I want the SimpleUrlHandlerMapping to take priority over the DefaultAnnotationHandlerMappings in my application.

Answer 1

DispatcherServlet should consult the various HandlerMapping beans in the order in which they're declared in the beans file. The first one that says "yes, I have a mapping for that" gets the prize.

If you're manually declaring a SimpleUrlHandlerMapping and DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping, then make sure they're in the right order.

If you're not declaring them yourself, then Spring will use the defaults, which is a BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping followed by a DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping.

Answer 2

The best solution I found was to replace mvc:annotation-config with explicit DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping and AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter bean configuration. I was then able to set the order property on both SimpleUrlHandlerMapping (order = 0) and DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping (order = 1). This set the priority of the handlers as I needed.

I tried to reorder mvc:annotation-config below SimpleUrlHandlerMapping, but it didn't change the handler priority as needed.