Add attributes to the model of all controllers in Spring 3
Every single view in my Spring 3 app has a set of attributes they can rely on. So the first line of every controller is something like: ControllerHelper.addDefaultModel(model, personManager, request); In there I'll add user object and full name retrieved from the database if person is logged in set of variables which are typically set once (e.g. imagesHost ) set of languages a visitor can switch to current language some statistics (e.g. total # of people in our system) This all allows each view to display the logged in user's name, easily reference an image location, a list of languages and