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 that most web frameworks handle this (e.g grails does it with g:link tag) but I couldn't find any documentation on this in the official SpringMVC docs.
So I am scratching my head - Is this functionality in some tag library? Does the framework expose it? Do I have to extend the framework to get this to work?
Note, I am not taking about hardcoding the url (which is an obvious but weak solution) but rather generating it based on controller and action name.
UPDATE:
Spring MVC doesn't provide this functionality. There is a JIRA ticket though. You can vote here https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-5779
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!)
Spring MVC uses the standard JSTL tags in JSPs so:
<c:url value="/guestBook.html" var="guestBookLink" />
<a href="${guestBookLink}">Guest Book</a>
In your controller:
@RequestMapping(value = "/guestBook")
public String handleGuestBook() { ... }
Annotate your login method with @RequestMapping, like so:
@Controller
public class GuestBookController {
...
@RequestMapping(value="/mycontextroot/login", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String login() {
...
}
...
}
Then, in your JSP, create a link something like this:
<c:url var="loginlink" value="/mycontextroot/login.html">
</c:url>
<a href="${loginlink}">Login</a>
This assumes that your dispatcher servlet is looking for *.html URLs.
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.
