Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow

Now it is simply a matter of defining the RedirectViewinstance in views.xml (as shown

in Listing 6-50). The bean’s name will match the view name the controller is using (i.e.,

newPersonSuccess). We are setting contextRelativeto trueso that the RedirectViewwill

prepend the context path name for the web application to the URL value.

Listing 6-50.views.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC

"-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN"

"http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">

<beans>

<bean id="newPersonSuccess"

class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.RedirectView">

<property name="contextRelative" value="true" />

<property name="url" value="/personSuccess" />

</bean>

</beans>

One of the benefits of the RedirectViewis that it will convert each object from the model

and place them in the query string of the full URL. However, for this to work correctly, those

objects are converted to Strings. Therefore, if you will be using the RedirectViewwith objects

in the model, ensure that the next page expects only Strings from the model. We will now

slightly modify our Controller(as shown in Listing 6-51), explicitly adding each property we

will need for the success page.

Listing 6-51.Modified onSubmit Using Only Strings in the Model

Map<String, Object> model = new HashMap<String, Object>();

model.put("suggestedBook",

suggestBook(person.getFavoriteProgrammingLanguage()));

model.put("personName", person.getName());

model.put("personFavoriteProgrammingLanguage",

person.getFavoriteProgrammingLanguage());

Our success page’s message (shown in Listing 6-52) will now be changed to reference

the new model properties. Notice how we are accessing the model objects from the request

parameters (as indicated by the paramprefix). This is because the objects in the model are sent

to the next page via the query string, such as /personSuccess?personName=joe&suggestedBook=

titleautomatically by the RedirectView.

Listing 6-52.New Success Page Text

Welcome, ${param.personName}! You chose ${param.personFavoriteProgrammingLanguage}

as your favorite programming language. Therefore, we can recommend you

check out ${param.suggestedBook}.

166 CHAPTER 6 ■THE CONTROLLER MENAGERIE