Spring MVC - FlashAttributes

One of the common problem in a web based application, involving form submission is mutilple form submission, re-entering submitting the form on browser refresh, pop-up alert asking for re-submission of the form, if we press the back button. To overcome the above problem, we will be doing a redirect after a form submission instead of the forward. Doing a redirect causes the browser to do a new GET request and load the page, and provides a solution to the above mentioned problem, but comes with one serious problem, where we will be missing the vital data of request parameters and attributes.

To overcome this problem, Spring MVC comes with FlasAttributes. Flash attributes provide a way for one request to store attributes intended for use in another. This is most commonly needed when redirecting — for example, the Post/Redirect/Get pattern. Flash attributes are saved temporarily before the redirect (typically in the session) to be made available to the request after the redirect and removed immediately.

Spring MVC has two main abstractions in support of flash attributes. FlashMap is used to hold flash attributes while FlashMapManager is used to store, retrieve, and manage FlashMap instances.

Flash attribute support is always "on" and does not need to enabled explicitly although if not used, it never causes HTTP session creation. On each request there is an "input" FlashMap with attributes passed from a previous request (if any) and an "output" FlashMap with attributes to save for a subsequent request. Both FlashMap instances are accessible from anywhere in Spring MVC through static methods in RequestContextUtils.

Here in the below sample code, we are adding the expense details to the DB and redirecting back to the form, with the message saying the following expense have been added to the list.




Flash attributes added via RedirectAttributes are automatically propagated to the "output" FlashMap. Here we have added RedirectAttributes redirectAttrs to your Spring controller’s method addExpense. The addFlashAttribute method automatically add the given parameter to the output flash map and pass it to the subsequent requests.

Before your handler method will be called, Spring Framework will populate the Model with the available Flash Attributes – at this point value passed from addExpense will become a model attribute for the expenselist method, and the same can be added to the map, to return it to the presentation layer, to get it displayed. Here the from the redirect,it comes to the expenselist method, where it will reach as a ModelAttribute and the same have been defined in the method signature with the respective type.

@RequestMapping("/expenselist")
public String expenselist(Map map, @ModelAttribute("ExpenseName") String expenseName)
{
 List expenseTypeList = expenseTypeService.fetchAll();
 
 map.put("expense", new Expense()); 
 map.put("expenseTypeList", expenseTypeList);
 map.put("expenseList", expenseService.fetchAll()); 
 map.put("expenseName", expenseName);
 return "expenselist";
}

@RequestMapping(value="/addexpense", method=RequestMethod.POST)
public String addExpense(@ModelAttribute("expense") 
  Expense expense, BindingResult result, RedirectAttributes redirectAttrs)
{
 //System.out.println(expense.getExpenseTypeId());
 //System.out.println(expense.getName());
 expenseService.add(expense);
 redirectAttrs.addFlashAttribute("ExpenseName", expense.getName());
 return "redirect:/expenselist.html";
}

Happy Programming...!!!