Controller repeatedly calling itself in Spring-MVC

Question

I was trying to just output my request with just a direct write to the response object. This works great with servlets but with Spring-MVC I ended up creating an infinite loop for some reason I don't understand. Basically the controller just gets called repeatedly. I don't even know how that is possible.

public ModelAndView handleRequest(
        HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response )
        throws ServletException, IOException
{
    System.out.println("I will get called infinitely");
    response.getWriter().print( "Hello World!");
    response.getWriter().close();
    return new ModelAndView();

}

So the question is, does anyone know why it would cause an infinite amount of re-requests to this page? It seems to only occur when I am creating a ModelAndView() with nothing in it. But in this case I don't want anything in it, just a blank page. So secondly then is there a way to accomplish that?

Answer 1

Try to return null , instead of ModelAndView , and call flush() instead of close() . Like this,

public ModelAndView handleRequest( HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response )
        throws ServletException, IOException {

    System.out.println("I will get called infinitely");
    response.getWriter().print( "Hello World!");
    response.getWriter().flush();
    return null;    
}

NOTE: I am not sure, whether close() will commit the response or not, but flush() will.

Answer 2

Probably an empty viewName of the ModelAndView class will cause that the view from the current request will be used.

You can use void or @ResponseBody String as return type.