How does each dispatcher servlet know which controllers to check, in a multi-dispatcher application?

Question

Background

I am new to spring and have been looking at how the dispatcher probes @controller annotated classes and methods.

Question

If you can have multiple dispatcher servlets in a single web application how do you assign them to specific controllers?

Answer 1

Assuming Spring 3.x, you would configure each dispatcher with its own Spring configuration file (or class). Then (assuming an XML config) in one dispatcher, you would declare:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.acme.project.foo"/>

and in the other dispatcher you would do:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.acme.project.bar"/>

That way each dispatcher would be associated with different Controllers based on their package structure.