What are the recommended approaches for generating routes in Spring MVC?

Question

What are the recommended approaches for generating routes in a java-based Spring MVC webapp? I'd like to avoid hard-coding paths throughout the application.

Answer 1

Assuming we are talking about paths RequestMappings etc. In my application I have a single class with with a bunch of public static final constants that I reference in the @RequestMapping annotations.

So the constants might look like this:

public class Pages {
  public static final String FOO_URL "foo/foo.action"
  public static final String FOO_VIEW "test/foo"

  public static final String BAR_URL "bar/bar.action"
  public static final String BAR_VIEW "test/bar"
}

then inside your controller you'd reference them like this:

@RequestMapping(value=Pages.FOO_URL, method=RequestMethod.GET)
public String handleFoo(Model model) {
      return Pages.FOO_VIEW;
    }

They're easy to change as they're all in one place.