By default, where does Spring Boot expect views to be stored?

Question

I\'m experimenting on re-writing my configuration-heavy, vanilla Spring MVC project using Spring Boot. I started a brand new Spring Boot project in IntelliJ using the Spring

Answer 1

The Solution

I found the answer via trial-and-error, which turned out rather annoying. I hope someone can correct me if this conclusion is wrong, but it appears that Spring Boot does not like the string WEB-INF. I renamed the WEB-INF directory to view and changed the application.properties to the following and the view loaded successfully.

spring.mvc.view.prefix=/view/
spring.mvc.view.suffix=.jsp

Additional Findings

The objective of this exercise was to create a working example of a minimal, Java-based configuration so I continued minimalising the setup. I then found that lots of advice dished out on multiple SO threads and forums did not help. @JBNizet provided a link in his comment to the Spring Boot docs which lists a very salient point that no one has mentioned: JSPs simply do not play well with Spring Boot as it has limitations depending on the embedded container chosen. With that in mind, I decided to try replacing JSPs with ThymeLeaf templates.

My new working config removes the need for these:

• No need to add application.properties: spring.mvc.view.prefix + spring.mvc.view.suffix
• No need to change the packaging type from jar to war
• No need to modify main class
• No need to add pom.xml dependencies for
  • org.springframework.boot / spring-boot-starter-tomcat
  • org.springframework.boot / tomcat-embed-jasper
  • javax.servlet / jstl

So just the default Spring Boot template and 2 ThymeLeaf dependencies with the views named as ViewName.html placed in src/main/resources/templates.

    org.thymeleaf
    thymeleaf



    org.thymeleaf
    thymeleaf-spring4