Question

I am using Spring MVC for an application I am building. Everything is working fine, but what I do not know how to do is a simple link with Spring. Currently, I have everything mapped with a *.htm to a controller. This all works fine because they have controllers to handle them.

What I am not sure how to do is a simple link where there is an anchor tag that has a .jsp link, and it just goes to that page, and needs no form processing.

I know this is a very basic question, but I just want to know the easiest way to configure this.

And if this is not possible, and all links must go through a controller, I would like to know.

Thank you.

Answer 1

First thing you need to do is make sure you don’t have a Spring DispatcherServlet mapped to the root of the application context. e.g., if your Dispatcher is mapped to /* change it to /pages/* or something. A dispatcher sitting on the root will “eat” any requests for regular resources. (Alternately you could customize it to pass through for static resources, but that’s I think beyond the scope of the question.) Then if you just put a jsp file in your webapp/whatever folder (not /WEB-INF, the level above it.) You should be able to navigate to it normally.

/webapp/whatever/index.jsp

/webapp/WEB-INF/dispatcher-servlet.xml

web.xml :

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

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

Should result in being able to go to http://soisawesome.com/app/whatever/index.jsp as well as /pages/controllerhandledform.htm