Question

I’m trying to return content other than json in my Controller, but I can’t seem to get it to work. Ideally, I’d like to return a rendered velocity template as plain text or html.

This is what I have in my controller:

@RequestMapping( value = "time", headers = "Accept=*/*", method = RequestMethod.GET )
public @ResponseBody
Date getCurrentTime( HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response ) {
    response.setContentType( "text/plain" );

    return new Date();
}

And this is in my springmvc-servlet.xml (I know this is not right…but I’m a bit lost here):

<context:component-scan base-package="com.paml.alerter.controller" />

<!-- Configures the @Controller programming model -->
<mvc:annotation-driven />

<bean id="viewResolver"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.velocity.VelocityViewResolver">
    <property name="cache" value="true" />
    <property name="prefix" value="" />
    <property name="suffix" value=".vm" />
</bean>

<!-- This bean sets up the Velocity environment for us based on a root path 
    for templates. Optionally, a properties file can be specified for more control 
    over the Velocity environment, but the defaults are pretty sane for file 
    based template loading. -->
<bean id="velocityConfig"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.velocity.VelocityConfigurer">
    <property name="resourceLoaderPath" value="/WEB-INF/velocity/" />
</bean>

Does anyone know how to set this up right?

TIA

Answer 1

If your method is annotated with @ResponseBody, then the Spring MVC view layer will be bypassed entirely.

If you’re not interested in JSON output, then @ResponseBody is inappropriate – just remove it, and your Velocity views will be used.

If you need to switch between JSON and some other View layer, then you should consider removing @ResponseBody and using ContentNegotiatingViewResolver instead. See the Spring docs for how to set this up.