Spring MVC Ajax Controllers

In this post I will show how to implement Ajax calls via a spring MVC Controller.
Let’s see a simple controller Spring MVC Ajax example. As expected, it’s just a matter of anotating a method inside a @Controller class. Later I will show a simple jsp page which uses JQuery to make an Ajax call to the Spring MVC Controller.

MyController.java – A Simple Controller Class with

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1. @Controller  
2. public class AjaxController {  
3.         @RequestMapping(value = "/helloajax", method = RequestMethod.GET)  
4.         public @ResponseBody  
5.         void fetchFlowDowns(HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {  
6.           
7.         String helloAjax = "<b>Hello Ajax</b>"  
8.   
9.         response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");  
10.         response.setContentType("text/html");  
11.         response.getWriter().write(helloAjax);  
12.   
13.     }  
14. }  

In the above controller we simply added an annotation in the singnature of the method: public @responseBody…
We also set the required encoding on the response. This is important when dealing with i18n webapps.

myView.jsp – A Simple jsp file, making an Ajax call to the controller we created above

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1. <script type="text/javascript">  
2. function helloAjax()  
3.         $.ajax({  
4.             url : "/myapp/app/helloajax",  
5.             data : "message=Hello Ajax!",   
6.             success : function(result) {  
7.                 $("#helloDiv").html(result);  
8.             }  
9.         });  
10.     });  
11. });  
12. </script>  
13.   
14.   
15.     <a onclick="helloAjax();">Say Hello</a> <div name="helloDiv" id="helloDiv"></div>     

There is nothing special in the code above. I just use JQuery built in function for Ajax call.

Conclusion
Making Ajax call into a Spring MVC Controller is again very easy and work very well as a Controller component. My suggestion is that for Ajax, create a separate Ajax controllers.

Relevant SpringFramework documentation: Spring MVC Controllers – Documentation

Enjoy!

Src ---> commonj.com

Posted in: Ajax,Spring,Spring MVC 3