Routing with Spring

Routing works the same way with Spring as it does with a plain Flow application. To be able to handle the default route you just define a component with @Route("") annotation:

Java

  1. @Route("")
  2. public class RootComponent extends Div {
  3. public RootComponent(){
  4. setText("Default path");
  5. }
  6. }

In the same way you may define any other router path. See Defining Routes with @Route tutorial and other router tutorials for more details about using router.

The only thing that is new here for Spring is the possibility to use dependency injection in the components annotated with @Route. Such a component is instantiated by Spring and becomes a Spring initialized bean. In particular it means that you may autowire other Spring managed beans. Here is an example:

Java

  1. @Route("")
  2. public class RootComponent extends Div {
  3. public RootComponent(@Autowired DataBean dataBean){
  4. setText(dataBean.getMessage());
  5. }
  6. }
  7. public interface DataBean {
  8. String getMessage();
  9. }
  10. @Component
  11. public class DataBeanImpl implements DataBean {
  12. public String getMessage(){
  13. return "message";
  14. }
  15. }

You should be aware of the difference between running the application as a Spring Boot application and a WAR application deployed to a Web server. In the latter case all @Route annotations are discovered out of the box due to Servlet 3.0 specification. It doesn’t happen automatically in the Spring Boot application case due to a design decision (see https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/321). Vaadin Spring add-on implements scanning for route classes (and other Vaadin types that needs to be discovered and registered at startup) for Spring Boot applications for you. But this scanning is done only inside Spring Boot application class package (the package where @SpringBootApplication class is located). If your application contains route classes in packages that are not scanned by default then you have two options: either move them into the @SpringBootApplication application class package (or its subpackages) or explicitly specify the packages where the scanning should discover the route classes. @EnableVaadin annotation allows you to do this via its value parameter.

Note
Normally you don’t need to use the @EnableVaadin annotation at all with Spring Boot. The annotation is intended to be used in Spring MVC case where it enables the Vaadin configuration. In Spring Boot case auto-configuration is available which makes it work out of the box. So the only reason why you need to use @EnableVaadin is specifying the packages to scan.