Why Did I Want a JSON View Resolver?

In my previous post, I documented a scenario that I encountered while setting up a JSON view resolver in a Spring MVC project.  Let me take a step back and explain my motivations for why I wanted a JSON view resolver.

In any Spring MVC application, Controller classes are responsible for processing some data, then returning a ModelAndView .  Typically views eventually return HTML either directly from a JSP or through a templating framework like Tiles.  However, custom views  can provide output such as Excel or PDF files.  In my case, I wanted an easy way to return a JSON response from certain Controller methods that would be called from an Ajax request.

HTML is a perfectly valid response to an Ajax request; often the Javascript processes an HTML response and then inserts the HTML into a page.  But occasionally JSON makes more sense, like when a page simply needs to know something about what is going on back on the server without displaying anything to the user(for example, whether the user has a valid session that has not timed out).  JSON is the native format of Javascript, so it is a convenient way to return a response to a Javascript client.

I found a great project called Spring Json View that offers all the features of Spring MVC like validation, exception handling, and error handling and automatically converts the Model to a JSON object.  It was probably a bit more than I needed for what I was trying to accomplish, but I was working on an internal company project and one of our secondary goals was to build skills and identify patterns that would be useful on future projects.  So I tested it out for this simple scenario, and I expect that this pattern could be useful on future projects.

Check out the configuration snippets from my previous post to see how I integrated Spring Json View into Spring MVC.

Also, here’s a quick example of how a controller method can use it:

[code lang=”java”]

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)

public ModelAndView isLoggedIn(ModelMap model) {

model.addAttribute(“loggedIn”,

!SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getName().equals(“guest”));

return new ModelAndView(“jsonView”, model);

}

[/code]

• Spring Mvc
• JSON
• Ajax