How to get the instances of the WebApplicationContext and DispatcherServlet in the spring-web-mvc at the runtime of an spring web application

Question

i want to get the instance of the WebApplicationContext and the DispatcherServlet instance in the function under the controller class.

Answer 1

As of Spring 2.5, you can get a reference to WebApplicationContext using @Autowired annotation:

@Autowired
WebApplicationContext applicationContext;

You can also obtain a reference of ApplicationContext by implementing ApplicationContextAware interface :

public class YourController implements ApplicationContextAware {
ApplicationContext applicationContext;
public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext applicationContext) throws BeansException {
this.applicationContext = applicationContext;
}
...
}

But I don't think there is way to get a reference to the DispatcherServlet instance or to an instance of any Servlet present in your application. Earlier there was a way to obtain it using ServletContext.getServlet(), which is deprecated now.