Question

I try to solve the following problem:

I have set up my own viewResolver, adding a header and footer to all my requests (thanks, stackoverflow ;p). This works fine.

Problem is that my ajax-requests, that return a view to a specific container, also automatically get the header and footer which of course is not intended.

How can I get the viewResolver to act different if a request contains ‘/ajax/’? Actually, the jstl-Viewer works fine for them, but at the moment, my own resolver is the only one used because I don’t know how to tell spring to act different on ‘/ajax/’.

Here my own resolver, pretty simple, just taken from here:

public class ViewTemplate extends InternalResourceView {
    @Override
    protected void renderMergedOutputModel(Map<String, Object> model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
        String dispatcherPath = prepareForRendering(request, response);
        request.setAttribute("partial", dispatcherPath.substring(nthOccurrence( dispatcherPath, '/' , 2 ) + 1));

        RequestDispatcher rd = request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/views/layout.jsp");
        rd.include(request, response);
    }

    // more functions like nthOccurrence


}

Do I have to tell this resolver that if indexOf(“/ajax/”) != -1 jstView needs to be called? And if yes, how?
Or am I doing it completely wrong? I would like to keep my header/footer as they are for all non-ajax-requests!

Any help appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

You have put the code for a View not a ViewResolver right, I think a good solution could be to chain the ViewResolvers – just declare a new ViewResolver for your ajax views. For the Ajax related views, let this view resolver return a value, else return null, this will automatically get the ViewResolver to consider the next ViewResolver in the chain which can be your current ViewResolver.

eg.

<beans:bean id="ajaxViewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <beans:property name="order" value="1"></beans:property>
    <beans:property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/" />
    <beans:property name="viewNames">
        <beans:list>
            <beans:value>ajax*</beans:value>
        </beans:list>
    </beans:property>
    <beans:property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
</beans:bean>

In the above case, if you return your view name from a controller as “ajaxsomeview” then it will be handled by ajaxViewResolver, if you return “somethingelse” it will be handled by your current ViewResolver.