How can I create a URL based on controller and action method in Spring MVC?

Question

I am using Spring MVC 3.0

I have a guestbook.jsp page where I want to create a link that points to GuestBookController\'s login method.

This is a simple task

Answer 1

The short answer is no, you can't do this with Spring MVC currently.

It's a shame because you can do this in other frameworks including Grails (which uses Spring MVC under the hood).

See the discussion here which includes a link to a Spring feature request to add this (vote for it!)

Answer 2

For a long time I have thought about implementing something like this using CGLib proxies but was too lazy. It appears Spring HATEOS library will allow you to do it the proxy way I wnated to and variety of other ways.

Answer 3

Spring MVC uses the standard JSTL tags in JSPs so:

<c:url value="/guestBook.html" var="guestBookLink" />
<a href="${guestBookLink}">Guest Book</a>

In your controller:

@RequestMapping(value = "/guestBook")
public String handleGuestBook() { ... }

Answer 4

Annotate your login method with @RequestMapping, like so:

@Controller
public class GuestBookController {
  ...
  @RequestMapping(value="/mycontextroot/login", method = RequestMethod.GET)
  public String login() {
    ...
  }
  ...
}

Then, in your JSP, create a link something like this:

<c:url var="loginlink" value="/mycontextroot/login.html">
</c:url>
<a href="${loginlink}">Login</a>

This assumes that your dispatcher servlet is looking for *.html URLs.