Question

I have code along the following lines in my Spring MVC webapp:

@RequestMapping("/{someVariable}/aPath/aPage.do")
public void serveAPage() {
    doStuff();
}

We want “someVariable” to be in the URL, but we aren’t interested in capturing and using the value of it. Is there any way of replacing it with a wildcard, e.g. /*/aPath/aPage.do?

Answer 1

Yes, @RequestMapping accepts Ant-style patterns as from http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/bind/annotation/RequestMapping.html#params()

So this works:

@RequestMapping(value="/*/test2.do")
public void getMeta5(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
    final PrintWriter writer = response.getWriter();
    writer.print("requestURI:" + request.getRequestURI());
    writer.flush();
}

This assumes that servlet-mapping in web.xml maps that URL path to the DispatcherServlet, e.g.

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>spring</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>spring</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>