Spring MVC

LibreHealth strongly subscribes to the Model-View-Controller pattern. We won't go into the depths of MVC, or even the basics of it. Spring has also written a fair amount on how and why to use MVC. OpenMRS, for the most part, uses the domain objects as the model. Most controllers will be SimpleFormControllers and be placed in the org.openmrs.web.controller package. There are some controllers that have been rewritten to use Spring 2.5+ annotations. We recommend using those. The model is set up in the controller's formBackingObject, and processed/saved in the processFormSubmission and onSubmit methods. The jsp views are placed in /web/WEB-INF/view.

Not all files served by the webapp are run through Spring. The /web/WEB-INF/web.xml file maps certain web page extensions to the SpringController. All .form, .htm, and *.list pages are mapped. The SpringController then uses the mappings in the openmrs-servlet.xml file to know which pages are mapping to which Controller.

There are no .jsp pages that are accessed directly. If a pages url is /admin/patients/index.htm, the jsp will actually reside in /web/WEB-INF/view/admin/patients/index.jsp. This is necessary so that we can do the redirect with the SpringController. Because the file being accessed ends with .htm, the SpringController is invoked by the web server. When the SpringController sees the url, it simply replaces .htm with .jsp and looks for the file in /web/WEB-INF/view/ according to the jspViewResolver bean in openmrs-servlet.xml. If the page being accessed was patient.form, the mapping in the urlMapping bean would have told spring to use the PatientFormController and the patientForm.jsp file.

That spring descriptor file also contains settings for the max form upload size, locale changing, message names, fieldGen handlers, and name/address templates (to be removed: TRUNK-368 ).