Question

Currently my web.xml shows the following…

<!-- Spring Web MVC dispatcher servlet -->
<servlet>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
    <url-pattern>*.json</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

What I’d like to do is limit all .json URLs to a specific controller. To be honest I’m not entirely sure how DispatcherServlet in Spring works, so I’m not sure if this is on the right track or not.

Answer 1

The DispatcherServlet follows the request to the right Spring controller. So, depending of your web.xml, you can do this in your web.xml:

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

And create a Spring controller, with annotations for instance, like:

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/*.json")
public class TheController {

}

Some usefull resources:
http://blog.netapsys.fr/index.php/post/2008/04/13/Introduction-A-Spring-MVC
http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/