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View Resolution

Spring MVC defines the ViewResolver and View interfaces that let you render models in a browser without tying you to a specific view technology. ViewResolver provides a mapping between view names and actual views. View addresses the preparation of data before handing over to a specific view technology.

The following table provides more details on the ViewResolver hierarchy:

Table 1. ViewResolver implementations
ViewResolver	Description
`AbstractCachingViewResolver`	Subclasses of `AbstractCachingViewResolver` cache view instances that they resolve. Caching improves performance of certain view technologies. You can turn off the cache by setting the `cache` property to `false`. Furthermore, if you must refresh a certain view at runtime (for example, when a FreeMarker template is modified), you can use the `removeFromCache(String viewName, Locale loc)` method.
`UrlBasedViewResolver`	Simple implementation of the `ViewResolver` interface that effects the direct resolution of logical view names to URLs without an explicit mapping definition. This is appropriate if your logical names match the names of your view resources in a straightforward manner, without the need for arbitrary mappings.
`InternalResourceViewResolver`	Convenient subclass of `UrlBasedViewResolver` that supports `InternalResourceView` (in effect, Servlets and JSPs) and subclasses such as `JstlView`. You can specify the view class for all views generated by this resolver by using `setViewClass(..)`. See the `UrlBasedViewResolver` javadoc for details.
`FreeMarkerViewResolver`	Convenient subclass of `UrlBasedViewResolver` that supports `FreeMarkerView` and custom subclasses of them.
`ContentNegotiatingViewResolver`	Implementation of the `ViewResolver` interface that resolves a view based on the request file name or `Accept` header. See Content Negotiation.
`BeanNameViewResolver`	Implementation of the `ViewResolver` interface that interprets a view name as a bean name in the current application context. This is a very flexible variant which allows for mixing and matching different view types based on distinct view names. Each such `View` can be defined as a bean e.g. in XML or in configuration classes.

Handling

See equivalent in the Reactive stack

You can chain view resolvers by declaring more than one resolver bean and, if necessary, by setting the order property to specify ordering. Remember, the higher the order property, the later the view resolver is positioned in the chain.

The contract of a ViewResolver specifies that it can return null to indicate that the view could not be found. However, in the case of JSPs and InternalResourceViewResolver, the only way to figure out if a JSP exists is to perform a dispatch through RequestDispatcher. Therefore, you must always configure an InternalResourceViewResolver to be last in the overall order of view resolvers.

Configuring view resolution is as simple as adding ViewResolver beans to your Spring configuration. The MVC Config provides a dedicated configuration API for View Resolvers and for adding logic-less View Controllers which are useful for HTML template rendering without controller logic.

Redirecting

See equivalent in the Reactive stack

The special redirect: prefix in a view name lets you perform a redirect. The UrlBasedViewResolver (and its subclasses) recognize this as an instruction that a redirect is needed. The rest of the view name is the redirect URL.

The net effect is the same as if the controller had returned a RedirectView, but now the controller itself can operate in terms of logical view names. A logical view name (such as redirect:/myapp/some/resource) redirects relative to the current Servlet context, while a name such as redirect:https://myhost.com/some/arbitrary/path redirects to an absolute URL.

Forwarding

You can also use a special forward: prefix for view names that are ultimately resolved by UrlBasedViewResolver and subclasses. This creates an InternalResourceView, which does a RequestDispatcher.forward(). Therefore, this prefix is not useful with InternalResourceViewResolver and InternalResourceView (for JSPs), but it can be helpful if you use another view technology but still want to force a forward of a resource to be handled by the Servlet/JSP engine. Note that you may also chain multiple view resolvers, instead.

Content Negotiation

See equivalent in the Reactive stack

ContentNegotiatingViewResolver does not resolve views itself but rather delegates to other view resolvers and selects the view that resembles the representation requested by the client. The representation can be determined from the Accept header or from a query parameter (for example, "/path?format=pdf").

The ContentNegotiatingViewResolver selects an appropriate View to handle the request by comparing the request media types with the media type (also known as Content-Type) supported by the View associated with each of its ViewResolvers. The first View in the list that has a compatible Content-Type returns the representation to the client. If a compatible view cannot be supplied by the ViewResolver chain, the list of views specified through the DefaultViews property is consulted. This latter option is appropriate for singleton Views that can render an appropriate representation of the current resource regardless of the logical view name. The Accept header can include wildcards (for example text/*), in which case a View whose Content-Type is text/xml is a compatible match.

See View Resolvers under MVC Config for configuration details.