Question

The post request to my controller action is coming from ajax like this:

$.post("myurl.htm", { view: $("#selView").val(), 
    val1: "value1", val2: "value2"
});

I have two Models Foo and Bar

public class Foo {
   public String val1;
   //getter/setters
}

public class Bar {
   public String val2;
   //getters/setters
}

Now, my controller action looks like this:

@RequestMapping(value="/myurl.htm", method=RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView doSomething (
    @RequestParam(value="view", required=true) String view, 
    @RequestParam(value="val1", required=false) String val1, 
    @RequestParam(value="val2", required=false) String val2) {
  Foo foo = new Foo();
  Bar bar = new Bar();
  if (view.equalsIgnoreCase("something"))  
     foo.setVal1(val1);
  else if (view.equalsIgnoreCase("somethingelse"))  
     foo.setVal2(val2);

  fooService.doSomeStuffWithDb(foo);
  barService.doSomeStuffWithDb(bar);

}

Questions

1. Even though, everything above works I think there should be a better way to do this…? What if I had 10 parameteres posting in my post request, would I have 10 parameters in my controller action?? This would not scale well.

2. So, is there a way that spring can automagically bind the parameters to there relevant getters/setters on the model?

Answer 1

spring can inject request parameters as a Map:

@RequestMapping(value="/foo", method=RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView doSomething (@RequestParam Model<String, String> params) {
    params.get("val1");
    params.get("val2");
    // ...
}

use your javascript unmodified. this is not as elegant as the @ModelAttribute version, but scales prety well with a lot of parameters.