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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T10:46:43+00:00

A psuedo controller method @RequestMapping(/foo) public String getFoo(Model model) { model.add(foo, repo.findFoo()); model.add(bar, repo.findBar());

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A psuedo controller method

@RequestMapping("/foo")
public String getFoo(Model model) {
   model.add("foo", repo.findFoo());
   model.add("bar", repo.findBar());
   model.add("barOptions", repo.findBarOptions(bar));
   return "fooView";
}

Let’s say the client uses Expression language to render foo and bar; but we use JavaScript to render barOptions. 

<html>
    <script>
    var options = <mytag:toJSON object="${barOptions}"/>;
    $("#options").renderOptions( options );
    </script>
    <body>
        <mytag:renderFoo foo="${foo}"/>
        <mytag:renderBar foo="${bar}"/>
        <ul id="options"></ul>
    </body>
</html>

Common conventions tells me this is bad. But the essence of MVC, where the controller sends data and the view determines how to use it, tells me this is good. Is there a better way to do the same thing? Is there any reason why this isn’t commonly done? I could request the JSON using a separate call, but then I have to make more requests for the page to load, and there may be logic to determine barOptions in the controller method getFoo() based on other input at the time of the page load.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    At first glance I can not say that I see anything blatantly wrong with approach. The only aspect that initially took me off guard was your need to convert data in the model object to json.

    For me, JSON usually implies that there is some sort of server side object that needs to be converted so that a client side javascript can access or manipulate its structure in a javascript way. I guess without knowing more of the purpose of the options list, I can’t see a reason why json serialization is required here.

    By using a Tag to convert a model object to JSON, we avoid an
    additional request made by the client

    But if we assume that JSON is a requirement (perhaps for some third party jquery plugin), then I absolutely do not see anything wrong with approach.

    What is special or different about the barOptions unordered list, why does it have be rendered with json? Why not just use a for loop to build the list items? Or you can have a custom tag that builds out the ul entirely.

    Aside from that, I missing the point as how one may perceive this as being bad code.

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