Flash attributes provide a way for one request to store attributes that are intended for use in another. This is most commonly needed when redirecting — for example, the Post-Redirect-Get pattern. Flash attributes are saved temporarily before the redirect (typically in the session) to be made available to the request after the redirect and are removed immediately.
Spring MVC has two main abstractions in support of flash attributes. FlashMap
is used
to hold flash attributes, while FlashMapManager
is used to store, retrieve, and manage
FlashMap
instances.
Flash attribute support is always “on” and does not need to be enabled explicitly.
However, if not used, it never causes HTTP session creation. On each request, there is an
“input” FlashMap
with attributes passed from a previous request (if any) and an
“output” FlashMap
with attributes to save for a subsequent request. Both FlashMap
instances are accessible from anywhere in Spring MVC through static methods in
RequestContextUtils
.
Annotated controllers typically do not need to work with FlashMap
directly. Instead, a
@RequestMapping
method can accept an argument of type RedirectAttributes
and use it
to add flash attributes for a redirect scenario. Flash attributes added through
RedirectAttributes
are automatically propagated to the “output” FlashMap. Similarly,
after the redirect, attributes from the “input” FlashMap
are automatically added to the
Model
of the controller that serves the target URL.
The concept of flash attributes exists in many other web frameworks and has proven to sometimes be exposed to concurrency issues. This is because, by definition, flash attributes are to be stored until the next request. However the very “next” request may not be the intended recipient but another asynchronous request (for example, polling or resource requests), in which case the flash attributes are removed too early.
To reduce the possibility of such issues, RedirectView
automatically “stamps”
FlashMap
instances with the path and query parameters of the target redirect URL. In
turn, the default FlashMapManager
matches that information to incoming requests when
it looks up the “input” FlashMap
.
This does not entirely eliminate the possibility of a concurrency issue but reduces it greatly with information that is already available in the redirect URL. Therefore, we recommend that you use flash attributes mainly for redirect scenarios.