Share a common parent path when implementing Spring controllers

Question

I want to be able to define a parent Controller class which will have a mapping of "/api", and then extend that controller with my different implementations. So ApiController will have:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/api")

For example, my User controller should extend the base api controller and also add "/users" to the path, so it will answer to "/api/users" requests. So UserController will have:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/users")

but since it extends ApiController, it will effectively answer to /api/users.

Naturally I can prepend "/api" to all controllers so that this is achieved without the parent class, but I prefer to do it "the right way" if it's possible, so that I can define my api implementations with a cleaner and more visible path.

I tried extending the ApiController base class, but this does not work, UserController still answers to "/users" and ignores the base class "/api".

Answer 1

Hmmm. You can try this, it is what works for me:

@RequestMapping("/abstract")
public abstract class AbstractController {


}

@Controller
public class ExtendedAbstractController extends AbstractController {

   @RequestMapping("/another")
   public String anotherTest() {
       return "another";
   }

}

Note, your base class must have no @Controller annotation and must be abstract.

If you try to do extend not abstract class annotated as controller and that has @RequestMappings you get errors on step where RequestMappingHandlerMapping initializing.