Specify which ViewResolver to use per Controller?

Question

I have a freemarker viewresolver in my spring application:

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver">

In my controller methods i can return the name of my freemarker template:

return "timeline";

Works without any problems.

Now i've created a new template language and i want a few controllers to use this custom template language. So i created a CustomViewResolver.

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.CustomViewResolver">

Now i have 2 view resolvers, a freemarker one and my custom one.

How can i specify which ViewResolver should be used by which controller?

Cause my backend will use freemarker and my frontend the custom one.

Answer 1

You could try something along the lines of the following example:

Folder and file structure

webapp
   WEB-INF
       dispatcher-servlet.xml
       jsp
         bar
           bar-baz.jsp
         foo
           foo-fro.jsp

dispatcher-servlet.xml

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/bar/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
  <property name="viewNames" value="bar-*"/>
</bean>
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/foo/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
  <property name="viewNames" value="foo-*"/>
</bean>

Controller

@RequestMapping(value="/bar")
public String bar() { return "bar-baz"; }

@RequestMapping(value="/foo")
public String foo() { return "foo-fro"; }

You will be taking advantage of the view name pattern-matching offered by the framework. If you run into problems, you can try setting an additional order property for the view resolvers to control the order in which the resolvers should attempt to locate views for a request. You would put your custom view resolver at the top (lowest order) and try others if the custom resolver fails.