This example describes how to render a Surf page through Spring Web MVC.
In this example:
- A request arrives to a simple Spring Surf application in the following form: http://localhost:8080/hotels
- The Spring MVC dispatcher receives this request and tries to find a controller that matches the URI /hotels. In this case, it does not find a match. Thus, a controller is not found, nothing is invoked, and a model is not set up.
- The Spring MVC dispatcher then tries to find a view resolver that can resolve views for the URI /hotels. It will walk through the available view resolvers and ask each one if it can handle this URI.
- Since this is a simple Surf application, each of the Surf view resolvers are
interrogated and asked whether they can resolve /hotels. The two most
interesting resolvers are these:
- PageViewResolver checks to see if there is a Surf Page object defined that maps to the URL /hotels. If so, it produces a PageView view object to render the response.
- WebScriptViewResolver checks to see if there is a web script defined that maps to the URL /hotels. If so, it produces a WebScriptView view object to render the response.
- If a PageView is produced, Surf renders back the Hotels page. If a WebScriptView is produced, Surf asks the web script engine to render back the web script matching the URI /hotels.
-
To render back a Hotels page that lists all the hotels available on your
website, define a page in Surf that maps to the /hotels URI using the following
XML. For example:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <page> <id>hotels</id> </page>
Surf picks this up as it knows there is a page object with the URI /hotels.
-
Provide the template to use to render markup to the response by hardcoding in
FreeMarker. For example:
<html> <body> <table> <tr> <td>Walton Cottage</td> <td>Maidenhead, UK</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Victorian Treasure</td> <td>Lodi, WI</td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>
When you hit the /hotels URI, the dispatcher walks through the view
resolvers and settles on the PageViewResolver and renders your page to
the browser.