Daniel E. Markle's Blog

When using Spring annotation based controllers, @RequestMapping must be applied to a method as well as the class or it will not work. For example:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/blah.html")
public MyController {
 @ModelAttribute("session")
 public InventorySession getSession() {
  return session;
 }
}

Will result in No mapping found for HTTP request with URI [/[contextpath]/blah.html] errors. Request methods (or sub-pages) must be mapped to controller methods, i.e.:

. . .
 @RequestMapping(method={RequestMethod.GET})
 public String getForm() {
  return "formView.jsp";
 }
. . .

This mistake is particularly easy to make when migrating older code to the newer annotation based model, where mappings on legacy code may make it (erroneously) appear such linking is done in the xml file already.

Spring, my favorite Java application framework, doesn't provide an easy way to bind Spring-managed session beans to JSP pages. I have had success doing this by binding the bean to the request at creation time. When doing it this way, be sure to call the session bean somewhere in your dispatch servlet configuration or it will never be initialized when individual requests are created.

Note that for most applications, session beans are better left as plain objects managed independently of Spring for less overhead and to keep them as simple as possible. Each of these is going to take up space for each user. However, I have found some cases where accessing Spring objects from within a session bean is desirable; if you have as well or curiosity prevails, details are below.