Exercises

While reading the chapter, you created a basic Hello, World application using Spring Boot called hello-spring. Open that project up in IntelliJ, and get ready to add some features!

Create and checkout a branch for your exercises solution. Name it something useful, such as controller-exercises.

Modify your HelloController class to display a form on a GET request that asks the user for both their name and the language they would like to be greeted in. It should look something like this:

The resulting form submission should return and display the message, “Bonjour Chris”.

When the user submits the form (via a POST request), they should be greeted in the selected language. Your new feature should:

1. Include at least 5 languages, with English being the default. If you don’t speak 5 languages yourself, ask your friend the Internet .
2. Include a new public static method, createMessage, in the HelloController that takes a name as well as a language string. Based on the language string, you’ll display the proper greeting.

@RequestMapping(value="hello", method = RequestMethod.POST)
@ResponseBody
public String helloPost(@RequestParam String name, @RequestParam String language) {
    if (name == null) {
        name = "World";
    }

    return createMessage(name, language);

    // For a bonus mission, students can change this response text to look nicer.
    // This is subjective, but students should be modifying the HTML of the response string.
}

public static String createMessage(String n, String l) {
    String greeting = "";

    if (l.equals("english")) {
        greeting = "Hello";
    }
    else if (l.equals("french")) {
        greeting = "Bonjour";
    }
    else if (l.equals("italian")) {
        greeting = "Bonjourno";
    }
    else if (l.equals("spanish")) {
        greeting = "Hola";
    }
    else if (l.equals("german")) {
        greeting = "Hallo";
    }

    return greeting + " " + n;
}

Commit your changes!

Bonus Mission

1. Instead of returning the greeting as plain text, add a bit of HTML to the response string so that the displayed message looks a bit nicer.