Question

I would like to have URL mappings that I’m having with spring framework like below in standard servlet web.xml configuration.

 @RequestMapping(value="/students/{username}", method=RequestMethod.GET)
  public String deleteSpitter(@PathVariable String username) {
    ...
    ...
  }

I would like URL mappings like these two:

/students/Mike

/students/John

to be mapped to same servlet where I can also read “Mike” and “John” as parameters somehow. If it can be extended to more than one level like the example below it could be very much useful for me:

/students/{schoolname}/{studentname}
like:

/students/mcgill/mike

/students/ubc/john

Answer 1

You can map a standard servlet to a wildcard path and access the pathInfo part of the request using the HttpServletRequest.getPathInfo() method.

The servlet should get the path info like this

package com.acme;

public class TestServlet extends HttpServlet {

    @Override
    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        String info = request.getPathInfo();
    }

}

and you should map the servlet in your web.xml like this

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>test-servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.acme.TestServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

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

If you request the URL ‘/test/mcgill/mike’ the path info will be ‘/mcgill/mike’. Parsing the path info is up to you.

If you work with a Java EE 6 compliant container you should also take a look at the JAX-RS specification to build RESTful web services.