Integrating Spring request scope with JSF controllers

Question

I am working on a project that uses a hybrid of JSF and Spring-MVC. User interface endpoints are accessed through a JSF front controller (javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet), whereas REST service calls are accessed through a Spring-MVC front controller (org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet). Deeper layers are Spring-managed (more-or-less). I don't like this arrangement, but I'm not in a position to change it.

The problem is that Spring's request-scoped beans aren't initialized when processing requests that come in through the JSF front controller. Is there an off-the-shelf solution for integrating Spring's WebApplicationContext with the JSF machinery so that the Spring request-scoped beans are initialized for each request regardless of whether that request comes through the JSF or Spring servlet?

Answer 1

There are two ways to integrate JSF with Spring, depending on which framework you want to give most control:

JSF front controller: One way is to route all requests via the JSF faces servlet and let JSF route them to controllers, let JSF manage navigation state via faces-config. Then inject spring beans into JSF managed beans and access spring beans from the facelets view using value expressions via SpringBeanFacesELResolver.

See this post for a working example .

Spring front controller: put spring as a front controller with a dispatcher servlet and put in place spring webflow. This is the preferred and most powerful way to integrate the two frameworks, see this section of the documentation .

Spring webflow will manage the navigation state and the faces config file is mostly empty. There is no need for the JSF managed beans layer, request get directly handled by webflow.

Actions in JSF buttons trigger webflow transitions directly, and spring beans can also be used in value expressions to build the view. With this solution the integration with Spring is more seamless as webflow offers more possibilities then the JSF navigation mechanism: trigger bean methods between transitions, post redirect get pattern for avoiding double submissions.

Namelly the problem with the initialization of spring request scoped beans is solved with this direction, altough an alternative for this is to add a RequestContextListener OR a RequestContextFilter to web.xml (see section 3.4.4.1 of the docs ).