What's the best way to get the current URL in Spring MVC?

Well there are two methods to access this data easier, but the interface doesn't offer the possibility to get the whole URL with one call. You have to build it manually:

public static String makeUrl(HttpServletRequest request)
{
    return request.getRequestURL().toString() + "?" + request.getQueryString();
}

I don't know about a way to do this with any Spring MVC facilities.

If you want to access the current Request without passing it everywhere you will have to add a listener in the web.xml:

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>

And then use this to get the request bound to the current Thread:

((ServletRequestAttributes) RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes()).getRequest()

Instead of using RequestContextHolder directly, you can also use ServletUriComponentsBuilder and its static methods:

• ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentContextPath()
• ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentServletMapping()
• ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentRequestUri()
• ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentRequest()

They use RequestContextHolder under the hood, but provide additional flexibility to build new URLs using the capabilities of UriComponentsBuilder.

Example:

ServletUriComponentsBuilder builder = ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentRequestUri();
builder.scheme("https");
builder.replaceQueryParam("someBoolean", false);
URI newUri = builder.build().toUri();

Java's URI Class can help you out of this:

public static String getCurrentUrl(HttpServletRequest request){
    URL url = new URL(request.getRequestURL().toString());
    String host  = url.getHost();
    String userInfo = url.getUserInfo();
    String scheme = url.getProtocol();
    String port = url.getPort();
    String path = request.getAttribute("javax.servlet.forward.request_uri");
    String query = request.getAttribute("javax.servlet.forward.query_string");

    URI uri = new URI(scheme,userInfo,host,port,path,query,null)
    return uri.toString();
}