Mapping to a View in Spring When No Controller Logic is Required
Posted on Jul 20, 2013 (last modified May 7, 2021)
I’ve always felt stupid for writing a simple Spring controller just to return a view when no controller logic is required. Turns out, I was right; there is a better way. So, okay. I was stupid, but now I know and here it is.
Since Spring 3.0, you can use the following tag in your XML configuration:
<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="home"/>That’s an example of a view-controller definition that forwards to a home page without any custom backing controller. The Spring 3.0 documentation describes the tag as follows:
This tag is a shorcut for defining a ParameterizableViewController that immediately forwards to a view when invoked. Use it in static cases when there is no Java Controller logic to execute before the view generates the response.
Following is an example of the full dispatcher-servlet.xml file that I’m using at the moment. You can see at the very bottom that I’ve mapped two of these. The path ‘/index’ routes to a FreeMarker view I’ve defined in an index.ftl file and the path ‘/about’ routes to another FreeMarker view defined in the file, about.ftl.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">
<!-- This must remain in place even if there are no uses of the properties loaded in this file because
it prepares the properties for use in Java classes. For example: @Value("$\{ldp.installableDataPath\}")
private String installableDataPath; -->
<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:/config.properties" />
<!-- Spring will search in the bellow paths controller an services annotations -->
<context:component-scan base-package="com.base22" />
<!-- The URL mapping definition -->
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping" />
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter"/>
<!-- freemarker config -->
<bean id="freemarkerConfig" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurer">
<property name="templateLoaderPath" value="/WEB-INF/ftl/" />
</bean>
<!-- View resolvers can also be configured with ResourceBundles or XML files. If you need different
view resolving based on Locale, you have to use the resource bundle resolver. -->
<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver">
<property name="cache" value="true" />
<property name="prefix" value="" />
<property name="suffix" value=".ftl" />
</bean>
<!-- The following tags are shorcuts for defining a ParameterizableViewController that immediately forwards
to a view when invoked. They are used in static cases when there is no Java Controller logic to execute before
the view generates the response. -->
<mvc:view-controller path="/index" view-name="index" />
<mvc:view-controller path="/about" view-name="about" />
</beans>If you prefer Java code configuration over XML files for Spring, you can do this:
@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
@Override
public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("home");
}
}