What are the recommended approaches for generating routes in Spring MVC?

What are the recommended approac开发者_运维知识库hes for generating routes in a java-based Spring MVC webapp? I'd like to avoid hard-coding paths throughout the application.

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Assuming we are talking about paths RequestMappings etc. In my application I have a single class with with a bunch of public static final constants that I reference in the @RequestMapping annotations.

So the constants might look like this:

public class Pages {
  public static final String FOO_URL "foo/foo.action"
  public static final String FOO_VIEW "test/foo"

  public static final String BAR_URL "bar/bar.action"
  public static final String BAR_VIEW "test/bar"
}

then inside your controller you'd reference them like this:

@RequestMapping(value=Pages.FOO_URL, method=RequestMethod.GET)
public String handleFoo(Model model) {
      return Pages.FOO_VIEW;
    }

They're easy to change as they're all in one place.

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You say you'd like to avoid hard-coding paths throughout the application, but typically all the controllers (and thus all the url mappings) reside in one directory. For example if you have a maven structure they'll be someplace like src/main/java/com/mycompany/myapp/web/controllers/. Do you envision yourself ever asking the question, "Just where did I put the url mapping for the /myapp/v1/search endpoint?", and not being able to figure out that it's in /src/main/java/com/mycompany/myapp/web/controllers/V1SearchController.java?

Also once you choose the urls they're pretty much fixed since they represent an interface with clients, and changing them probably means breaking backward compatibility.

Not that I think a class with a bunch of static final Strings is all that bad, I just think it's mostly unnecessary.