Question

My controllers are currently mapped to be something like http://example.com/fix.go and, of course, I think that’s idiotic and want something nicer like http://example.com/fix or http://example.com/mmm/fix with no extension. When I try to configure this, however, I can’t get it to work. I’m clearly missing a key part of understanding on the entire mapping. I’m using Spring 3.x, tomcat, and annotations for the controllers.

My web.xml is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app
    version="2.4"
    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">

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

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>BooBoo</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.*</url-pattern>   <!-- was *.go when it worked -->
    </servlet-mapping>

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>

</web-app>

BooBoo-servlet.xml is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" 
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context 
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">

    <context:component-scan base-package="com.foofoo.booboo"/>

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"/>
        <property name="prefix" value="/jsp/"/>
        <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

And one of my controllers is configured as such:

@Controller
public class BangBangController extends BaseController {

            // Used to be fix.go when it worked
    @RequestMapping( value="fix", method=RequestMethod.GET )
    public ModelAndView choose(
            HttpSession session,
            @RequestParam( value="fixId", required=false, defaultValue="-1" ) Integer fixId,
            @RequestParam( value="forkId", required=false, defaultValue="-1" ) Integer forkId 
    )
    throws Exception { ... }
}

I’ve tried changing the mapping in web.xml to /mmm/* expecting URLs like http://example.com/mmm/fix to work, but that too has not worked. I get “missing resource” errors when I enter what I think are the correct URLs in the browser.

What am I goofing up here? What critical piece of understanding do I lack? I’ve tried making the no extension thing work on another project at work, and couldn’t get it to go there either. I’m obviously missing something.

Answer 1

The problem is your dispatcher servlet is matching anything with a “.” in it.

Change it to

 <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> 

However, that’s also bad as you won’t be able to serve static content.

What you really should do is this:

 <url-pattern>/webapp/*</url-pattern> 

Where “webapp” is some prefix. All of your URLs will need to be prefixed with it, but that allows you to still serve static content.