10.5. Exercises: Controllers and Routing

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!

Note

Before your start these exercises, take a look at the hello-spring-demo class-annotations branch. to make sure your own application matches ours.

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:

Greeting Form

Greeting Form

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

Note

The language is presented in a dropdown, more formally known as a select element. For more information about the select element and how it works, read the MDN documentation.

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.

Check your solution

Commit your changes!

10.5.1. 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.