Question

I would highly appreciate it if someone can share their thoughts on this. I am new to Spring, but not new to MVC. However, my exposure with MVC has mostly been on the front-end side of things.

Lets say if I have a dynamic site which employs SpringMVC Framework 3.0, and site has 5 links such as:

HOME | FAMILY | COMEDY | HORROR | ACTION

Each of these links would query a database and display information. If I was to be doing this for front-end via a MVC framework, I would have five different controllers, but I came across a question here (Stackoverflow) which talks about having just one controller and then numerous resolvers. I would like to know what is the correct approach?

Here is the link to the mentioned question:
Spring controller setup question?

Answer 1

As Jaanas said, it really depends on how you are retrieving the data for each link and whether the resulting pages are all based on the same data model and templete (JSP) or are completely different to each other.

I tend to use a separate controller for “home” but if those other pages are simply querying a database then, I’d start serving those from a single controller.

Its also a good idea to try and think of your pages in terms of REST principles. Once you start seeing the links in terms of REST URIs, then the decision of whether the various URIs go in the same or separate controllers is obvious. E.g. if the URI for “family” is /movie/genre/family, then it becomes clear that all 4 of those links should go in the GenreController class (or a MovieController class, with a /genre method capturing the category with a @PathVariable annotation).