Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise

Customizing data binding

In the last section, you saw how to bind data submitted by an HTML form to a form backing bean. In order to do the binding, Spring MVC internally uses a special binding object called WebDataBinder (org.springframework.web.bind.WebDataBinder).

WebDataBinder extracts the data out of the HttpServletRequest object and converts it to a proper data format, loads it into a form backing bean, and validates it. To customize the behavior of data binding, we can initialize and configure the WebDataBinder object in our Controller. The @InitBinder (org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.InitBinder) annotation helps us to do that. The @InitBinder annotation designates a method to initialize WebDataBinder.

Let's look at a practical use ...