Showing a single Spittle

In our Spring Spitter Web App we want to display any single Spittle, just passing its id. This could be easily done accepting a request in the form of "spittles/show?id=42", following the style we have just used for getting a list of spittles, but we don't like it that much here, since we feel that "spittles/42" will be more expressive of the access to a resource.

Good for us, the Spring Framework has an handy approach to this problem.

Stripping down the view to the limit, what we want to get is something like this:

I have get it through a JSP page with JSTL tags, spittle.jsp, accessing an attribute named spittle that contains a Spittle object. Besides that minimal JSP, I have added a mock test to ensure the new functionality works fine. I have not much to say about them, and anyway you can see them on GitHub.

Let's see instead the new method added to SpittleController.

@RequestMapping(value = "/{spittleId}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String spittle(@PathVariable long spittleId, Model model) {
    model.addAttribute(spittleRepository.findOne(spittleId));
    return "spittle";
}

The spittle() method returns a string, the name of the view that should be generated for the caller, and expects two parameters, the spittle id and the model where we are going to push the Spittle object.
Notice that its first parameter is annotated as PathVariable, and notice also as the method is annotated as RequestMapping, with value set to a path. the path is built using curly brackets, signalling to Spring what is a variable that has to be extracted and used as parameter.
Being the class itself annotated as RequestMapping on "/spittles", the Spring framework is smart enough to understand what we want to do here.

Reference: Taking input via path parameters, from Spring in Action, Fourth Edition by Craig Walls. Chapter five, section 3.2.

You can find the code I have written on GitHub.