As I mentioned earlier, I recently moved back to the Java world after a brief and enjoyable foray into Groovy & Grails. After a few minutes of becoming reacquainted with Spring MVC, I found myself wanting to make my Spring MVC app behave more like a Grails app. I’m lazy, what can I say?

The request mapping annotations are the obvious first piece to the puzzle. The second piece is using model attributes. The third is a bit of javascript to get some flexibility in the view. Here we go.

Obviously, the class marked with the ModelAttribute annotation can be an actual model object or a command object.

The controller will look something like this:

/**
 * A simple controller, use it to display and update values in the command object.
 * 
 * @author justin
 */
@Controller
public class SampleController {

	@RequestMapping("/action-to-display-page.do") 
    public ModelAndView displayYourPage() {
		//build your command object
		ModelOrCommandObject modelOrCommandObject = new ModelOrCommandObject();
		modelOrCommandObject.setMessage("Hello world.");
		
		//put your command object in the model map.
		ModelMap modelMap = new ModelMap();
		modelMap.addAttribute("modelOrCommandObject", modelOrCommandObject);
		
		//build your ModelAndView object.
		ModelAndView modelAndView = new ModelAndView();
		modelAndView.addAllObjects(modelMap);
		modelAndView.setViewName("some-page.jsp");
		
		return modelAndView;
	}
	
	/**
	 * One of the actions that your page is submits to.
	 * @param modelOrCommandObject
	 * @param result
	 * @param status
	 * @return
	 */
	@RequestMapping("/one-action-to-call.do") 
    public ModelAndView actionOne( 
                    @ModelAttribute("modelOrCommandObject") ModelOrCommandObject modelOrCommandObject, 
                    BindingResult result, 
                    SessionStatus status) {
		//do whatever you need to with your command or model object for this command
		modelOrCommandObject.getMessage();
		return new ModelAndView();
	}
	
	/**
	 * Another action that your page submits to.
	 * @param modelOrCommandObject
	 * @param result
	 * @param status
	 * @return
	 */
	@RequestMapping("/another-action-to-call.do") 
    public ModelAndView actionTwo( 
                    @ModelAttribute("modelOrCommandObject") ModelOrCommandObject modelOrCommandObject, 
                    BindingResult result, 
                    SessionStatus status) {
		//do whatever you need to with your command or model object.
		modelOrCommandObject.getMessage();
		return new ModelAndView();
	}
}

We’ll have the option in the view to map one action to the controller or multiple actions. Multiple actions is easy with a bit of javascript.

The jsp will contain code like this;

<form:form action="/myapp/one-action-to-call.do" method="POST" modelAttribute="command" method="POST">
<!– some form fields –>
<button onclick="this.form.action=’/myapp/one-action-to-call.do’;submit()">One action</button>
<button onclick="this.form.action=’/myapp/another-action-to-call.do’;submit()">Another action</button>
</form:form>

That’s been working well for me as a simple bridge between Spring MVC and *some* of the convenience and efficiency of grails.