How to serve .html files with Spring

Question

I am developing a website with Spring, and am trying to serve resources that are not .jsp files (.html for example)

right now i have commented out this part of my servlet configuration

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" 
        p:prefix="/WEB-INF/jsp/" p:suffix=".jsp" />

And tried to return fromthe controller the full path to the resource.

@Controller
public class LandingPageController {

protected static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(LandingPageController.class);

@RequestMapping({"/","/home"})
public String showHomePage(Map<String, Object> model) {
    return "/WEB-INF/jsp/index.html";   
   }
}

the index.html file exists in that folder.

NOTE: when i change the index.html to index.jsp my server now serves the page correctly.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The initial problem is that the the configuration specifies a property suffix=".jsp" so the ViewResolver implementing class will add .jsp to the end of the view name being returned from your method.

However since you commented out the InternalResourceViewResolver then, depending on the rest of your application configuration, there might not be any other ViewResolver registered. You might find that nothing is working now.

Since .html files are static and do not require processing by a servlet then it is more efficient, and simpler, to use an <mvc:resources/> mapping. This requires Spring 3.0.4+.

For example:

<mvc:resources mapping="/static/**" location="/static/" />

which would pass through all requests starting with /static/ to the webapp/static/ directory.

So by putting index.html in webapp/static/ and using return "static/index.html"; from your method, Spring should find the view.

Answer 2

You can still continue to use the same View resolver but set the suffix to empty.

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" 
    p:prefix="/WEB-INF/jsp/" p:suffix="" />

Now your code can choose to return either index.html or index.jsp as shown in below sample -

@RequestMapping(value="jsp", method = RequestMethod.GET )
public String startJsp(){
    return "/test.jsp";
}

@RequestMapping(value="html", method = RequestMethod.GET )
public String startHtml(){
    return "/test.html";
}   

Answer 3

I'd just add that you don't need to implement a controller method for that as you can use the view-controller tag (Spring 3) in the servlet configuration file:

<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="/WEB-INF/jsp/index.html"/>

Answer 4

change p:suffix=".jsp" value acordingly otherwise we can develope custom view resolver

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.1.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/servlet/view/UrlBasedViewResolver.html

Answer 5

It sounds like you are trying to do something like this:

• Static HTML views
• Spring controllers serving AJAX

If that is the case, as previously mentioned, the most efficient way is to let the web server(not Spring) handle HTML requests as static resources. So you'll want the following:

1. Forward all .html, .css, .js, .png, etc requests to the webserver's resource handler
2. Map all other requests to spring controllers

Here is one way to accomplish that...

web.xml - Map servlet to root (/)

<servlet>
            <servlet-name>sprung</servlet-name>
            <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
            ...
<servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
            <servlet-name>sprung</servlet-name>
            <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Spring JavaConfig

public class SpringSprungConfig extends DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration {

    // Delegate resource requests to default servlet
    @Bean
    protected DefaultServletHttpRequestHandler defaultServletHttpRequestHandler() {
        DefaultServletHttpRequestHandler dsrh = new DefaultServletHttpRequestHandler();
        return dsrh;
    }

    //map static resources by extension
    @Bean
    public SimpleUrlHandlerMapping resourceServletMapping() {
        SimpleUrlHandlerMapping mapping = new SimpleUrlHandlerMapping();

        //make sure static resources are mapped first since we are using
        //a slightly different approach
        mapping.setOrder(0);
        Properties urlProperties = new Properties();
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.css", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.js", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.png", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.html", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.woff", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        urlProperties.put("/**/*.ico", "defaultServletHttpRequestHandler");
        mapping.setMappings(urlProperties);
        return mapping;
    }

    @Override
    @Bean
    public RequestMappingHandlerMapping requestMappingHandlerMapping() {
        RequestMappingHandlerMapping handlerMapping = super.requestMappingHandlerMapping();

        //controller mappings must be evaluated after the static resource requests
        handlerMapping.setOrder(1);
        handlerMapping.setInterceptors(this.getInterceptors());
        handlerMapping.setPathMatcher(this.getPathMatchConfigurer().getPathMatcher());
        handlerMapping.setRemoveSemicolonContent(false);
        handlerMapping.setUseSuffixPatternMatch(false);
        //set other options here
        return handlerMapping;
    }
}

Additional Considerations

• Hide .html extension - This is outside the scope of Spring if you are delegating the static resource requests. Look into a URL rewriting filter.
• Templating - You don't want to duplicate markup in every single HTML page for common elements. This likely can't be done on the server if serving HTML as a static resource. Look into a client-side *VC framework. I'm fan of YUI which has numerous templating mechanisms including Handlebars.

Answer 6

I faced the same issue and tried various solutions to load the html page from Spring MVC, following solution worked for me

Step-1 in server's web.xml comment these two lines

<!--     <mime-mapping>
        <extension>htm</extension>
        <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>--> 
<!--     <mime-mapping>
        <extension>html</extension>
        <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>
 -->

Step-2 enter following code in application's web xml

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.htm</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Step-3 create a static controller class

@Controller 
public class FrontController {
     @RequestMapping("/landingPage") 
    public String getIndexPage() { 
    return "CompanyInfo"; 

    }

}

Step-4 in the Spring configuration file change the suffix to .htm .htm

Step-5 Rename page as .htm file and store it in WEB-INF and build/start the server

localhost:8080/.../landingPage