Spring MVC - Session differences

Question

Are there any differences between getting session through HttpServletRequest.getSession() and HttpSession injected in controller's method?

Answer 1

Basically there is no diffrerence between the session object injected into a Spring MVC controller:

@RequestMapping(value = "/somepath", method = RequestMethod.POST)
@ResponseBody
public JsonResponse someMethod (HttpSession session)
{
 // play with session attributes
}

And the session object retrieved from the HttpServletRequest:

@RequestMapping(value = "/somepath", method = RequestMethod.POST)
@ResponseBody
public JsonResponse someMethod (HttpServletRequest request)
{
  Session session = request.getSession();
  // You are playin with the same session attributes.
}

The former style just provide you with a facility to get the contextual HttpSession object by injecting it as a controller argument so that Spring takes care of the all the dirty stuff for you.