Wednesday 4 July 2007

SimpleFormController Cheat Sheet

I felt I didn't have a good understanding of Spring MVC until I understood the lifecycle of the controller. Not being able to find any good resources that showed the workflow step by step, I created this flowchart of the SimpleFormController.

In a single page cheat sheet format, I've found it handy to keep it on my desk. For the beginner, it should be used in conjunction with the API, and nothing beats firing up a debugger and stepping through the code yourself. Once you understand the SimpleFormController, you can easily understand the WizardFormController or create your own custom controller.

I hope someone will find this useful. Please leave comments and let me know if anything is wrong, or if there are any suggestions. Cheers!

SimpleFormController Cheat Sheet

37 comments:

TheStijn said...

Very handy, they should include this in the spring manual!

thanks

Anonymous said...

Dude, This is awesome! I just recently did this exercise myself (using a debugger). I simply noted the stack trace in a text file, but your diagram, however, is much more useful. Thanks, Guest

Anonymous said...

Anyone using Spring should have a copy of this chart readily available. Its the big picture consolidated onto one page! Very cool...

Anonymous said...

This was so helpful - thanks.
Got any others?!

Anonymous said...

Its great. Thanks for all the work put into it

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the excellent work and effort! Your diagram is very useful.

Anonymous said...

Awesome work! It really helps as a dashboard view. Flow diagram snapshot covers pages of documentation.

Anonymous said...

Respect man, respect!
Just what I was looking for.

kanchaba said...

great great help man, this certainly helped simply my model, otherwise i was using cryptic mechanisms to identify formChange :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks. Just what i needed. 5 out of 5.

Эли said...

Thanks a lot! You save a big amount of time for me!

Anonymous said...

The most useful Spring-related piece of info all over the web. Made me move out from quick-sands...

Ryan Berg said...

Great work, I would like to use this as an image for a presentation I am doing on spring to an OWASP (http://www.owasp.org) meeting in NYC. This is non-profit event.

Kenneth Ko said...

Thanks for all the comments, nice to see that this is still useful!
I was recently lucky enough to see Rod Johnson give a presentation on Spring 2.5, in particular the Spring MVC annotation support.
By not needing to extend the standard base classes, i think it can drastically simplify the framework.
Won't need my cheat sheet anymore! =) Can't wait to try it out!

Anonymous said...

I hope this will be helpfull for me, it's just what i was seeking for.
Thanks.

Charles Goddard said...

Great flow diagram! I put it on the wall of whatever shop I go to. Good conversation piece. ;)

Any plans on diagramming the AbstractWizardFormController or Web Flow?

Anonymous said...

This diagram visualizes very well what is wrong with Spring MVC: Philosophy of "Overwrite what you want" makes it easily the most complex web framework ever created.

Sometimes it seems like there was somekind of competition going on, who can make the most incomprehensible Java framework.

Steven said...

Very helpful! I was just struggling understanding the SimpleFormController and this will expedite my learning.
Thanks!

Marcos Vinícius said...

Very useful to teach new Spring users.
This Flow is a little complicated, but with your document, is very easy !

Thanks ;)

Anonymous said...

spring such a total HACK.
I am AMAZED people gloat how great it is. But for always saying anyone who criticizes it is not EDUCATED enough it just shows the TIME WASTED to get this junk to work is HORRENDOUS.

Anonymous said...

Wow, thanks!

This is the most useful thing I've seen in a while!

Best regards,
Antti
Finland

Anonymous said...

Good job. It gave all the info i was looking for

preet said...

awesum work... I was drawing this using a pen & paper but when i saw this diagram it really made me very happyyyyyyy......Thanks bro

Oleg said...

Great work, I have a copy hanging over my computer.

One mistake in the flowchart that I bumped into:
In column B, if suppressValidation returns TRUE, the onBindAndValidate(..) is still called in BaseCommandController.bindAndValidate in Spring 2.0.x. The suppressValidation() only affects the invocation of the validators.

chitra said...

Please keep up the great work. If possible pls make one for spring and hibernate work flow diagram

Anonymous said...

Thanks, mate. This is incredibly useful. Our team has had a very confusing time trying to get our heads around the workflow of the myriad of controllers in Spring MVC.

Anonymous said...

Awesome flowchart . Incredibly simple and elegant way of explaining the controller life cycle. Way to go !!

Xaeryan said...

Great job, very useful. Just one thing, you might want to add referenceData() to the chart.

Xaeryan said...

Oops, nevermind, I missed it first time looking. Perfect!

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Rebeccah said...

Oh this is perfect, Thank You!!!

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Now I can see what method I need to override to do what I want to do.

Rebeccah

Chris Serra said...

Thanks a lot. I needed a break down to do some custom routing, and this helps.

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