Is it possible to access Spring MVC annotated session vars across multiple controllers?

Question

I have a web app running Spring 3.0 and using Spring-MVC. I have a few controllers set up like this:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/admin")
@SessionAttributes({"clientLogin", "selectTab", "user", "redirectUrl"})
public class AdminController {
...
}

@Controller
@SessionAttributes({"clientLogin", "selectTab", "user", "redirectUrl"})
public class PublicController {
....
}

I can add the annotated variables into the ModelMap with something like

map.addAttribute("user", "Bob");

That works fine to persist the variable in the current controller; I can access the var from the modelMap from any other method in that controller. But when the user hits a page in another Controller, even though the same variable is listed in the @SessionAttributes, it's not available in the second controller.

Is it possible to access these annotated variables across multiple controllers using the annotations?

Answer 1

No it isn't possible - SessionAttributes are badly named in my opinion.

If you want to share these attributes across different controllers, you can explicitly put them into the session using:

session.setAttribute()