Using HttpServletRequest in Spring Service Layer

Question

Environment :

Spring MVC 3

Angular JS

Tomcat 6

Issue :

We are migrating a legacy application from struts2 to spring MVC REST with angular JS as UI. This is a typical SPA.

The typical application flow is : Angular JS + Spring REST controller + Servicelayer

The business logic in struts2 actions is moved to service classes.

My question is - What is the correct way to make HttpServetRequest object available to Service classes in Spring ?

Two options available are :

1)Pass HttpServletRequest to Spring MVC controller method. Pass the same HttpServetRequest to Spring service layer. But this will result in HttpServletRequest being part of Service interface like -

public ProductDto getProductDetails(HttpServletRequest req,int productId)

Is this a correct way ? Can HttpServletRequest be part of Service interface ?

2)Use Spring provided API :

HttpServletRequest request = ((ServletRequestAttributes) RequestContextHolder.getRequestAttributes()).getRequest();

Please guide on this ?

Ali Dehghani · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-12 16:26:18Z

4

In addition to those mentioned options, you can introduce a class or another abstraction into your service layer, then populate it with the required parts of the HttpServletRequest and use that abstraction inside the Service Layer.

For example (Borrowed from Spring Data), Suppose you want to access to page, size and sort and user related query strings from the HttpServletRequest. Instead of passing the request to the service layer methods, you can also encapsulate those parameters into an abstraction, say, Pageable or UserFilterCriteria:

public interface Pageable {
    int page();
    int size();
    List<Sort> sorts();
}

Then instead of passing the HttpServletRequest to the service layer:

public interface UsersService {
    List<User> filterUsers(HttpServletRequest request);
}

You can pass those new abstractions:

public interface UsersService {
    List<User> filterUsers(UserFilterCriteria criteria, Pageable pageable);
}

This way you can easily define abstractions in the same level of abstraction as your service layer.

edited Jun 12, 2016 at 16:26

answered Jun 12, 2016 at 14:39

Ali Dehghani

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1 Comment

Atul Over a year ago

If we want finer grain access to request object like getting/setting request/session attributes , then above approach would be dufficult

Florian Stendel · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-16 21:18:20Z

1

You should rather not make HttpServletRequest/-Response be part of your service-layer, as HttpServletRequest/-Response are classes specific to your user interface/view technology. Introducing them to your service layer will make your service layer depend on the technology used for the user interface, thus making it harder to change the UI/View technology later.

answered Jun 16, 2016 at 21:18

Florian Stendel

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