spring - Can SpringMVC be configured to process all requests, but exclude static content directories?

Question

If I map my spring application to process all incoming requests ('/*'), then requests for static content return 404's. For example, a request for "myhost.com/css/global.css" would return a 404, even though the resource exists as Spring intercepts the request.

The alternative is to map SpringMVC to a subdirectory (for example '/home/'), but in this case, you must pass this directory in all links within the application. Is there a way to map SpringMVC to '/' and exclude a set of directories from processing?

My current web.xml configuration is:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>springApp</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>springApp</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/home/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Idealy I would like to have the mapping be something like the following:

 <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>springApp</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <exclude>/css/*,/js/*</exclude>
 </servlet-mapping>

Is this type of thing possible?

Answer 1

NOTE: this answer applies to Spring 3.0.4+ ONLY

(BTW, this question has also been dealt with here: Spring serving static content with mvc:resources, invalid xsd)

Check out the Spring mvc-showcase project in the Spring subversion samples repository. It shows exactly what you want to do, namely that you can delineate static resources which will not be processed by the DisapatcherServlet. See file /mvc-showcase/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/servlet-context.xml. Here's a snippet of how I handle these exclusions, where the JS, CSS, and images are in the app context root (with the MVC namespace mapped to mvc:

<!-- resources exclusions from servlet mapping -->
<mvc:resources mapping="/css/**" location="/css/" />
<mvc:resources mapping="/images/**" location="/images/" />
<mvc:resources mapping="/js/**" location="/js/" />