Question

I’m creating a hello world spring project on glassfish 2.1. I’m trying to use the SimpleUrlHandlerMapping to map everything that ends in /spring/*.htm to my spring controller. Here is what I have:

web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
    version="2.4">
    <display-name>Test MVC Project</display-name>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>
            org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
        </servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

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

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list> 
</web-app>

in my dispatcher-servlet.xml file:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

    <bean id="defaultController"
        class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ParameterizableViewController">
        <property name="viewName" value="WEB-INF/jsp/springbean-view.jsp" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="urlMapping"
        class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
        <property name="mappings">
            <props>
                <prop key="*.htm">defaultController</prop>
            </props>
        </property>
    </bean>

</beans>

My sun-web.xml file:

<sun-web-app>
    <context-root>/foo</context-root>
    <class-loader delegate="false" />
</sun-web-app>

When I request http://localhost:9680/foo, I see the welcome page. When I request http://localhost:9680/foo/spring/test.htm, I get a 404.

I have tried many variations of patterns in the urlMapping in the servlet.xml file. The only thing I have gotten to work is if I do this:

<bean id="urlMapping"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
    <property name="mappings">
        <props>
            <prop key="/*">defaultController</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean>

When I request http://localhost:9680/foo/spring, it works. To me, this means that my web.xml is correct because it is properly passing the request to the dispatch servlet. When I request http://localhost:9680/foo/spring/test.htm (or anything that ends in /spring/*, I get a 500 with this exception:

javax.servlet.ServletException: PWC1232: Exceeded maximum depth for nested request dispatches: 20

I feel like I’m doing something very stupid, but after several hours of googling and playing around with the mappings, I’m stumped.

Answer 1

This is almost correct:

<prop key="/*">defaultController</prop>

But that can be simpler still:

<bean id="urlMapping" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
    <property name="defaultHandler" ref="defaultController"/>
</bean>

Also, the reason you’re getting the endless forwarding loop is this:

<bean id="defaultController" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.ParameterizableViewController">
    <property name="viewName" value="WEB-INF/jsp/springbean-view.jsp" />
</bean>

The problem here is there’s no leading / on the viewName, so it’s interpreted as relative. So, when you go to the URL ending /foo/spring/test.htm, the relative forward URI is /foo/spring/WEB-INF/jsp/springbean-view.jsp, which in turn is caught by the url-pattern in web.xml, so it goers back into the DispatcherServlet, which forwards it on, etc etc etc. Endless loop.

Easy fix:

<property name="viewName" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/springbean-view.jsp" />

Note the leading /