Question

We are migrating our web application from Spring 2.5 to Spring 3.0.5. Looks like all the Controller classes (the classes in org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc package: BaseCommandController, AbstractCommandController, SimpleFormController, etc) have been deprecated. We used those classes heavily in our application. These classes have been replaced by @Controller annotation instead.

I have a few questions regarding Spring 3.0.x Controller configuration…

1. We used the following XML to create a Controller bean in Spring 2.5. If <context:component-scan> is used instead to create the Controller beans, then how do I wire-in the dependencies? If possible I would like to avoid Auto-Wiring.

<bean id="photosetViewController" class="com.xyz.web.PhotosetViewController"
    p:photosetManager-ref="photosetManager"
    p:photoManager-ref="photoManager" />

1. We have created 3 Interceptors. We use SimpleUrlHandlerMapping to map these Interceptors to different request URLs and also to map URLs to Controllers. How do we achieve the same in Spring 3.0.x?

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
    <property name="alwaysUseFullPath" value="true" />      
       <property name="interceptors">
           <list>
               <ref bean="httpRedirectInterceptor"/>
               <ref bean="loginInterceptor"/>
           </list>
       </property>      
        <property name="mappings">
            <value>             
                /abc.html=abcLookupController
                /photoupload.html=photoUploadController
          </value>
        </property>
</bean>

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.SimpleUrlHandlerMapping">
    <property name="alwaysUseFullPath" value="true" />      
       <property name="interceptors">
           <list>
               <ref bean="httpRedirectInterceptor"/>
               <ref bean="loginInterceptor"/>
               <ref bean="userMenuInterceptor" />
           </list>
       </property>      
        <property name="mappings">
            <value>
                /index.html=homepageController
                /success.html=simpleController
            </value>
        </property>
</bean>

1. In case of SimpleFormControllers we used different methods like initBinder, referenceData, formBackingObject. We also used command objects and validation classes. How do we achieve the same in Spring 3.0.x?

<bean id="photosetAddController" class="com.xyz.web.PhotosetAddController"
    p:photosetManager-ref="photosetManager"
    p:photosetTypeManager-ref="photosetTypeManager"
    p:stateManager-ref="stateManager" >
    <property name="validator">
    <bean class="com.xyz.form.PhotosetAddValidator" />
    </property>
    <property name="formView" value="photosetadd" />
    <property name="successView" value="redirect:/photoset" /> 
</bean>

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

As skaffman noted – your code will work fine without any modifications. I’ll answer your questions in short:

1. You can use @Resource(name="beanName") for name-based injection. But autowiring is also a good option. Either @Autowired, or @javax.inject.Inject. Note that you can use @Qualifier("name") to differentiate between beans with the same interface/base class. You can even use the javax.inject qualifiers (read about all these in the docs)

2. interceptor mappings can stay the same

3. There is @InitBinder, which denotes the initBinder method. I can’t tell about the other.