WebApplicationContext

Special Bean Types In the WebApplicationContext

The Spring DispatcherServlet uses special beans to process requests and render theappropriate views. These beans are part of Spring MVC. You can choose which specialbeans to use by simply configuring one or more of them in theWebApplicationContext.However, you don’t need to do that initially since Spring MVC maintains a list ofdefault beans to use if you don’t configure any. More on that in the next section. Firstsee the table below listing the special bean types the DispatcherServlet relies on.

Table 17.1. Special bean types in the WebApplicationContext

Bean type	Explanation
HandlerMapping	Maps incoming requests to handlers and a list of pre- and post-processors (handler interceptors) based on some criteria the details of which vary byHandlerMapping implementation. The most popular implementation supports annotated controllers but other implementations exists as well.
HandlerAdapter	Helps the DispatcherServlet to invoke a handler mapped to a request regardless of the handler is actually invoked. For example, invoking an annotated controller requires resolving various annotations. Thus the main purpose of a HandlerAdapter is to shield the DispatcherServlet from such details.
HandlerExceptionResolver	Maps exceptions to views also allowing for more complex exception handling code.
ViewResolver	Resolves logical String-based view names to actual View types.
LocaleResolver &LocaleContextResolver	Resolves the locale a client is using and possibly their time zone, in order to be able to offer internationalized views
ThemeResolver	Resolves themes your web application can use, for example, to offer personalized layouts
MultipartResolver	Parses multi-part requests for example to support processing file uploads from HTML forms.
FlashMapManager	Stores and retrieves the "input" and the "output" FlashMap that can be used to pass attributes from one request to another, usually across a redirect.