Spring MVC 3.0: How do I bind to a persistent object

Question

I\'m working with Spring MVC and I\'d like it to bind a a persistent object from the database, but I cannot figure out how I can set my code to make a call to the DB before

Answer 1

So I ended up resolving this by annotating a method with a @ModelAttribute of the same name in the class. Spring builds the model first before executing the request mapping:

@ModelAttribute("item")
BenefitType getBenefitType(@RequestParam("id") String id) {
    // return benefit type
}