Spring MVC @RequestMapping Inheritance

Question

Coming from Struts2 I'm used to declaring @Namespace annotation on super classes (or package-info.java) and inheriting classes would subsequently pick up on the value in the @Namespace annotation of its ancestors and prepend it to the request path for the Action. I am now trying to do something similar in Spring MVC using @RequestMapping annotation as follows (code trimmed for brevity):

package au.test  @RequestMapping(value = "/") public abstract class AbstractController {     ... }  au.test.user  @RequestMapping(value = "/user") public abstract class AbstractUserController extends AbstractController {      @RequestMapping(value = "/dashboard")        public String dashboard() {         ....     } }  au.test.user.twitter  @RequestMapping(value = "/twitter") public abstract class AbstractTwitterController extends AbstractUserController {     ... }  public abstract class TwitterController extends AbstractTwitterController {      @RequestMapping(value = "/updateStatus")         public String updateStatus() {         ....     } } 

• / works as expect
• /user/dashboard works as expected
• However when I would have expected /user/twitter/updateStatus to work it does not and checking the logs I can see a log entry which looks something like:

org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping - Mapped URL path [/tweeter/updateStatus] onto handler 'twitterController'

Is there a setting I can enable that will scan the superclasses for @RequestMapping annotations and construct the correct path?

Also I take it that defining @RequestMapping on a package in package-info.java is illegal?

Answer 1

The following basically becomes /tweeter/updateStatus and not /user/tweeter/updateStatus

public abstract class TwitterController extends AbstractTwitterController {      @RequestMapping(value = "/updateStatus")         public String updateStatus() {         ....     } } 

That's the expected behavior since you've overriden the original @RequestMapping you've declared in the AbstractController and AbstractUserController.

In fact when you declared that AbstractUserController it also overriden the @RequestMapping for AbstractController. It just gives you the illusion that the / from the AbstractController has been inherited.

"Is there a setting I can enable that will scan the superclasses for @RequestMapping annotations and construct the correct path?" Not that I know of.