Difference between / and /* in servlet mapping url pattern

Question

The familiar code:

    main
             


        

Answer 1

Perhaps you need to know how urls are mapped too, since I suffered 404 for hours. There are two kinds of handlers handling requests. BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping and SimpleUrlHandlerMapping. When we defined a servlet-mapping, we are using SimpleUrlHandlerMapping. One thing we need to know is these two handlers share a common property called alwaysUseFullPath which defaults to false.

false here means Spring will not use the full path to mapp a url to a controller. What does it mean? It means when you define a servlet-mapping:

    viewServlet
    /perfix/*

the handler will actually use the * part to find the controller. For example, the following controller will face a 404 error when you request it using /perfix/api/feature/doSomething

@Controller()
@RequestMapping("/perfix/api/feature")
public class MyController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/doSomething", method = RequestMethod.GET) 
    @ResponseBody
    public String doSomething(HttpServletRequest request) {
        ....
    }
}

It is a perfect match, right? But why 404. As mentioned before, default value of alwaysUseFullPath is false, which means in your request, only /api/feature/doSomething is used to find a corresponding Controller, but there is no Controller cares about that path. You need to either change your url to /perfix/perfix/api/feature/doSomething or remove perfix from MyController base @RequestingMapping.