/*
* Copyright 2002-2005 the original author or authors.
*
* Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
* you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
* You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package org.springframework.web.servlet;
import java.util.Map;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
/**
* MVC View for a web interaction. Implementations are responsible for rendering
* content, and exposing the model. A single view exposes multiple model attributes.
*
* <p>This class and the MVC approach associated with it is discussed in Chapter 12 of
* <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764543857/">Expert One-On-One J2EE Design and Development</a>
* by Rod Johnson (Wrox, 2002).
*
* <p>View implementations may differ widely. An obvious implementation would be
* JSP-based. Other implementations might be XSLT-based, or use an HTML generation library.
* This interface is designed to avoid restricting the range of possible implementations.
*
* <p>Views should be beans. They are likely to be instantiated as beans by a ViewResolver.
* As this interface is stateless, view implementations should be thread-safe.
*
* @author Rod Johnson
* @see org.springframework.web.servlet.view.AbstractView
* @see org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceView
*/
public interface View {
/**
* Return the content type of the view, if predetermined.
* <p>Can be used to check the content type upfront,
* before the actual rendering process.
* @return the content type String (optionally including a character set),
* or <code>null</code> if not predetermined.
*/
String getContentType();
/**
* Render the view given the specified model.
* <p>The first step will be preparing the request: In the JSP case,
* this would mean setting model objects as request attributes.
* The second step will be the actual rendering of the view,
* for example including the JSP via a RequestDispatcher.
* @param model Map with name Strings as keys and corresponding model
* objects as values (Map can also be <code>null</code> in case of empty model)
* @param request current HTTP request
* @param response HTTP response we are building
* @throws Exception if rendering failed
*/
void render(Map model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception;
}