What is the difference between a spring request mapping and url mapping?

Question

I stumbled across this question after reading the log of my spring boot applicaiton in debug mode.

At startup, the While the spring RequestMappingHandlerMapping is "Looking for request mappings in application context" and finds the resquest mappings defined on my controllers. Later the BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping is "Looking for URL mappings in application context" and fails to find one for every bean defined in my context (no URL paths identified)

My question is, what the difference between a request mapping and an url mapping, can someone link a documentation to read what the BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping is looking for?

Answer 1

RequestMappingHandlerMapping

According to the documentation, the RequestMappingHandlerMapping:

Creates RequestMappingInfo instances from type and method-level @RequestMapping annotations in @Controller classes.

A RequestMappingInfo can be instantiated with the constructor:

public RequestMappingInfo(String name,
                          PatternsRequestCondition patterns,
                          RequestMethodsRequestCondition methods,
                          ParamsRequestCondition params,
                          HeadersRequestCondition headers,
                          ConsumesRequestCondition consumes,
                          ProducesRequestCondition produces,
                          RequestCondition<?> custom)

and represents a request with a set of conditions to be matched.

BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping

The BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping is an:

Implementation of the HandlerMapping interface that map from URLs to beans with names that start with a slash ("/"),

and as a AbstractDetectingUrlHandlerMapping is:

detecting URL mappings for handler beans through introspection of all defined beans in the application context.