Call a servlet from a Spring controller

Question

I have a Spring controller (ReportController) and a regular servlet (ReportServlet).

I have a form that submits partial information, and the ReportController should fulfill the information before sending it to the ReportServlet to process. When I do this in the ReportController method:

return "/ReportServlet"; 

it tries to resolve to /views/ReportServlet (instead of directly /ReportServlet).

How can I invoke my servlet from the Spring Controller?

This is my web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<web-app ...>

    <display-name>MyProject</display-name>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/loginform.html</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

    ...

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>ReportServlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.mypackage.ReportServlet</servlet-class>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>ReportServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/ReportServlet</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping> 
   ...
    <session-config>
        <session-timeout>
            30
        </session-timeout>
    </session-config>

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>/loginform.html</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>

</web-app>

and my dispatcher-servlet.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
      ...
>

    <!-- Enable annotation driven controllers, validation etc... -->

    <mvc:annotation-driven />
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.p2p.reportsportal.controllers" />
    <context:property-placeholder location="classpath*:config.properties"/>
    <bean id="viewResolver"
      class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix">
            <value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
        </property>
        <property name="suffix">
            <value>.jsp</value>
        </property>
    </bean>

...

Answer 1

Try this:

return "forward:/ReportServlet";