Understanding the dispatcher-servlet.xml

Introduction#

In Spring Web MVC, DispatcherServlet class works as the front controller. It is responsible for managing the flow of the spring MVC application.

DispatcherServlet is also like normal servlet need to be configured in web.xml

dispatcher-servlet.xml

This is the important configuration file where we need to specify the ViewResolver and View components.

The context:component-scan element defines the base-package where DispatcherServlet will search the controller class.

Here, the InternalResourceViewResolver class is used for the ViewResolver.

The prefix+string returned by controller+suffix page will be invoked for the view component.

This xml file should be located inside the WEB-INF directory.

<beans xmlns="https://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:context="https://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
https://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
https://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
https://www.springframework.org/schema/context
https://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">
 
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.srinu.controller.Employee" />
 
    <bean
        class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix">
            <value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
        </property>
        <property name="suffix">
            <value>.jsp</value>
        </property>
    </bean>
</beans>

dispatcher servlet configuration in web.xml

In this XML file, we are specifying the servlet class DispatcherServlet that acts as the front controller in Spring Web MVC. All the incoming request for the HTML file will be forwarded to the DispatcherServlet.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
<web-app version="2.5"   
    xmlns="https://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"   
    xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"   
    xsi:schemaLocation="https://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee   
    https://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">  
 <servlet>  
    <servlet-name>spring</servlet-name>  
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>  
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>  
</servlet>  
<servlet-mapping>  
    <servlet-name>spring</servlet-name>  
    <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>  
</servlet-mapping>  
</web-app>