How to make a Model attribute global?

Question

I'm using Spring MVC Framework and I'd like all the .jsp pages of the View to have access to the User's attributes(name, sex, age...). So far, I use the addAttribute method of the Model(UI) in every Controller to pass the current User's attributes to the View. Is there a way to do this only once and avoid having the same code in every Controller?

Answer 1

You can use Spring's @ControllerAdvice annotation on a new Controller class like this:

@ControllerAdvice
public class GlobalControllerAdvice {

    @ModelAttribute("user")
    public List<Exercice> populateUser() {
        User user = /* Get your user from service or security context or elsewhere */;
        return user;
    }
}

The populateUser method will be executed on every request and since it has a @ModelAttribute annotation, the result of the method (the User object) will be put into the model for every request through the user name, it declared on the @ModelAttribute annotation.

Theefore the user will be available in your jsp using ${user} since that was the name given to the @ModelAttribute (example: @ModelAttribute("fooBar") -> ${fooBar} )

You can pass some arguments to the @ControllerAdvice annotation to specify which controllers are advised by this Global controller. For example:

@ControllerAdvice(assignableTypes={FooController.class,BarController.class})

or

@ControllerAdvice(basePackages={"foo.bar.web.admin","foo.bar.web.management"}))