How to serve .html files with Spring

I am developing a website with Spring, and am trying to serve resources that are not .jsp files (.html for example)

right now i have commented out this part of my servlet configuration

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" 
        p:prefix="/WEB-INF/jsp/" p:suffix=".jsp" />

And tried to return fromthe controller the full path to the resource.

@Controller
public class LandingPageController {

protected static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(LandingPageController.class);

@RequestMapping({"/","/home"})
public String showHomePage(Map<String, Object> model) {
    return "/WEB-INF/jsp/index.html";   
   }
}

the index.html file exists in that folder.

NOTE: when i change the index.html to index.jsp my server now serves the page correctly.

Thank you.

The initial problem is that the the configuration specifies a property suffix=".jsp" so the ViewResolver implementing class will add .jsp to the end of the view name being returned from your method.

However since you commented out the InternalResourceViewResolver then, depending on the rest of your application configuration, there might not be any other ViewResolver registered. You might find that nothing is working now.

Since .html files are static and do not require processing by a servlet then it is more efficient, and simpler, to use an <mvc:resources/> mapping. This requires Spring 3.0.4+.

For example:

<mvc:resources mapping="/static/**" location="/static/" />

which would pass through all requests starting with /static/ to the webapp/static/ directory.

So by putting index.html in webapp/static/ and using return "static/index.html"; from your method, Spring should find the view.

I'd just add that you don't need to implement a controller method for that as you can use the view-controller tag (Spring 3) in the servlet configuration file:

<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="/WEB-INF/jsp/index.html"/>

Background of the problem

First thing to understand is following: it is NOT spring which renders the jsp files. It is JspServlet (org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet) which does it. This servlet comes with Tomcat (jasper compiler) not with spring. This JspServlet is aware how to compile jsp page and how to return it as html text to the client. The JspServlet in tomcat by default only handles requests matching two patterns: *.jsp and *.jspx.

Now when spring renders the view with InternalResourceView (or JstlView), three things really takes place:

1. get all the model parameters from model (returned by your controller handler method i.e. "public ModelAndView doSomething() { return new ModelAndView("home") }")
2. expose these model parameters as request attributes (so that it can be read by JspServlet)
3. forward request to JspServlet. RequestDispatcher knows that each *.jsp request should be forwarded to JspServlet (because this is default tomcat's configuration)

When you simply change the view name to home.html tomcat will not know how to handle the request. This is because there is no servlet handling *.html requests.

Solution

How to solve this. There are three most obvious solutions:

1. expose the html as a resource file
2. instruct the JspServlet to also handle *.html requests
3. write your own servlet (or pass to another existing servlet requests to *.html).

For complete code examples how to achieve this please reffer to my answer in another post: How to map requests to HTML file in Spring MVC?

You can still continue to use the same View resolver but set the suffix to empty.

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" 
    p:prefix="/WEB-INF/jsp/" p:suffix="" />

Now your code can choose to return either index.html or index.jsp as shown in below sample -

@RequestMapping(value="jsp", method = RequestMethod.GET )
public String startJsp(){
    return "/test.jsp";
}

@RequestMapping(value="html", method = RequestMethod.GET )
public String startHtml(){
    return "/test.html";
}   

I faced the same issue and tried various solutions to load the html page from Spring MVC, following solution worked for me

Step-1 in server's web.xml comment these two lines

<!--     <mime-mapping>
        <extension>htm</extension>
        <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>--> 
<!--     <mime-mapping>
        <extension>html</extension>
        <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>
 -->

Step-2 enter following code in application's web xml

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.htm</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Step-3 create a static controller class

@Controller 
public class FrontController {
     @RequestMapping("/landingPage") 
    public String getIndexPage() { 
    return "CompanyInfo"; 

    }

}

Step-4 in the Spring configuration file change the suffix to .htm .htm

Step-5 Rename page as .htm file and store it in WEB-INF and build/start the server

localhost:8080/.../landingPage