How to render a View using AJAX in Spring MVC

Question

I'm using Spring MVC and I need to make an asynchronous call to the server and refresh only a piece of the page.

What I actually have is a Controller that returns a String. I call the Controller using JQuery (.post()) function.

The problem with my solution is that I'm not able to render a JSP like I do when I use ModelAndView as return type.

Is there any way to return a View already rendered?

Thanks in advance.

Neuquino

Answer 1

This answer is to just confirm that the answer by axtavt works. It took me a minute to realize what he was suggesting, so I thought I'd post a code-snippet to help out anyone coming along behind me. Kudos go to him, though! :)

MyController.java

@Controller public class MyController {      @RequestMapping( method=RequestMethod.GET, value="/mainView" )     public ModelAndView getMainView( ... ) {                 /* do all your normal stuff here to build your primary NON-ajax view          * in the same way you always do          */                  }      /* this is the conroller's part of the magic; I'm just using a simple GET but you      * could just as easily do a POST here, obviously      */     @RequestMapping( method=RequestMethod.GET, value="/subView" )     public ModelAndView getSubView( Model model ) {         model.addAttribute( "user", "Joe Dirt" );         model.addAttribute( "time", new Date() );         return new ModelAndView( "subView" );     }  } 

mainView.jsp

(...)  <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript">     function doAjaxPost() {          $.ajax({             type: "GET",             url: "subView",             success: function(response) {                 $("#subViewDiv").html( response );             }         });     } </script> <input type="button" value="GO!" onclick="doAjaxPost();" /> <div id="subViewDiv"></div>  (...) 

subView.jsp

(...)  <h3>     User Access Details </h3>  <p>     ${user} accessed the system on ${time} </p>  (...) 

And that's it! A thing of beauty; up to now, doing AJAX in Spring has been a huge pain... parsing big @ResponseBody's, building huge sets of HTML by concatenating stuff in JS... ugh... I can't believe how simple and awesome this approach is -- and wasn't aware of it until just now! :)

Answer 2

You can put this piece of page into a separate JSP and return a ModelAndView pointing to it from your method. There are no difference between AJAX and non-AJAX calls from that point.