How to configure emberjs routes in SpringMVC? - spring-mvc

Question

We have an Ember frontend and Spring Boot backend.
When Ember runs standalone on port 4200 and the Spring Boot backend on 8080, then everything works. But this scenario is somewhat unusual for production environments, not only because of CORS problem. The URL of the backend must be known already on build time (!) of the Ember application, because it's integrated within the compiled ember app. This is not possible for many projects. Therefore, we want to integrate the frontend Ember App in the Spring Boot backend, which is usual for e.g. SPA with AngularJS.
The Ember app (from /dist) is thus copied to src/main/resource/static. After adjusting the rootURL and API.host with the Ember app that works very well.
The problem arises now, when a manual reload for an URL is made in the browser. Such a URL is now an Ember route. The http-request arrives at the Spring Boot backend which don't knows the route and we got a 404 error.
How should SpringMVC (as part of the Spring Boot backend) answers the httpRequest for such a route, so that the Ember app continue their work and handle the request ?
HTML Page request (by browser)
http://host/springBootAppContext/index.html => src/main/resource/static/index.html (ember app)
REST API request (by Ember App)
http://host/springBootAppContext/users => RESTController mapped for /users
Ember Routing (by Ember App)
http://host/springBootAppContext/user-list => ???
You can't provide a normal Spring MVC #Controller class because the ModelView response is interpretet as user-list.html or similar which doesn't exist

Answer 1

after tests with different solutions I came up with a really simple one.
Provide a normal, non-REST controller with request mappings for every route defined by the ember app. Every such request have to be answered with the view name of the ember app start page (index.html in most cases). The browser loads that html page and starts the containing ember app. The ember app detects the route (because the route was part of the http request) and work according all specified route configurations (template, model, controller).
No 404 NotFound any more.
#Controller
public class EmberRouteController {
public static final String INDEX = "index.html";
#RequestMapping(value = "/ember-route-1", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String emberRoute1() {
return INDEX;
}
#RequestMapping(value = "/ember-route-2", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String emberRoute2() {
return INDEX;
}
}

Answer 2

The previous answer helped me a lot. But I was still thinking of better solution than creating backend APIs for each route. And I feel the better solution would be to put '#' in before ember route then ember routes serves the request rather than going to the backend server.
Router.reopen({
location: 'hash'
});
Ex: http://localhost:8008/#/first
Here first is my route. And I have put # in the URL, now reload of the page is working.
Hope this will help.