404 error while submitting spring form

Question

I'm having some problems trying to submit a form in Spring. Every time I try I get a 404 error. This is my controller:

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/admin/news")
public class NewsController {

    @Autowired
    private NewsService newsService;

    @RequestMapping(value = "/create", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String createNews(Model model) {
        return "admin.news.create";
    }

    @RequestMapping(value = "/list", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView listNews(Model model) {
        return listNews(1);
    }

    @RequestMapping(value = "/list/{pageIndex}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView listNewsPage(@PathVariable int pageIndex) {
        return listNews(pageIndex);
    }

    @RequestMapping(value = "/save", method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String saveNews(@Valid NewsDto newsDto, BindingResult bindingResult, Model model) {
        if (!bindingResult.hasErrors()) {
            newsService.save(newsDto);
            model.addAttribute("created", true);
            model.addAttribute("news", newsDto);
        }

        return "admin.news.create";
    }

    private ModelAndView listNews(int pageIndex) {
        ModelAndView modelAndView = new ModelAndView("admin.news.list");

        Page page = newsService.findAll(pageIndex);
        modelAndView.addObject("page", page);

        return modelAndView;
    }

    @ModelAttribute("news")
    private NewsDto newsDtoModel() {
        return new NewsDto();
    }
}

And this is the form (I'm using Apache Tiles):

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags/form" prefix="spring" %>

<div id="page-header">
    <h3>Create a news</h3>
</div>

<div id="page-content">
    <div class="panel">
        <div class="panel-heading">
            News creation form
        </div>

        <div class="panel-content">
            <spring:form method="post" commandName="news" action="save">
                <spring:input path="title" class="u-full-width" type="text" placeholder="Title of the news" required="true" />
                <spring:errors path="title" cssClass="validation-error" />

                <spring:textarea path="text" class="u-full-width" placeholder="News text" required="true" />
                <spring:errors path="text" cssClass="validation-error" />

                <input class="button-primary" type="submit" value="Submit" />
            </spring:form>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

I've read and tried all the solutions that I've found in SO related with this error without luck and I've also tried all possible route combinations in the form action but I always get that 404 error. Here is the header:

GET /admin/news/save HTTP/1.1 Host: myserver:8080 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,es;q=0.6 Cookie: JSESSIONID=2A3446E8A0A42C49B0ECF8EE2C38C917 DNT: 1 Referer: myserver:8080/admin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate Content-Language: en Content-Length: 1000 Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 17:11:24 GMT Expires: 0 Pragma: no-cache Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-Frame-Options: DENY X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

Any idea?

EDIT 1: I'll add here my configs.

ApplicationContext:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan("com.davidmogar.alsa")
@PropertySource("classpath:application.properties")
@Import({WebMvcContext.class, PersistenceContext.class, SecurityContext.class})
public class ApplicationContext {

    private static final String MESSAGE_SOURCE_BASE_NAME = "i18n/messages";

    @Bean
    MessageSource messageSource() {
        ResourceBundleMessageSource messageSource = new ResourceBundleMessageSource();
        messageSource.setBasename(MESSAGE_SOURCE_BASE_NAME);
        messageSource.setUseCodeAsDefaultMessage(true);

        return messageSource;
    }

    @Bean
    PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer propertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer() {
        return new PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer();
    }
}

WebAppInitializer:

public class WebAppInitializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {

    private static final String CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_ENCODING = "UTF-8";

    private static final String DISPATCHER_SERVLET_MAPPING = "/";

    @Override
    protected WebApplicationContext createRootApplicationContext() {
        WebApplicationContext context = super.createRootApplicationContext();
//        ConfigurableEnvironment env = (ConfigurableEnvironment) context.getEnvironment();
//        env.setActiveProfiles();
        return context;
}

@Override
protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
    return new Class<?>[]{ApplicationContext.class};
}

@Override
protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {
    return null;
}

@Override
protected String[] getServletMappings() {
    return new String[]{DISPATCHER_SERVLET_MAPPING};
}

@Override
protected Filter[] getServletFilters() {
    DelegatingFilterProxy delegatingFilterProxy = new DelegatingFilterProxy();
    delegatingFilterProxy.setTargetBeanName("springSecurityFilterChain");

    CharacterEncodingFilter characterEncodingFilter = new CharacterEncodingFilter();
    characterEncodingFilter.setEncoding(CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_ENCODING);
    characterEncodingFilter.setForceEncoding(true);
    OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter openEntityManagerInViewFilter = new OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter();
    HiddenHttpMethodFilter hiddenHttpMethodFilter = new HiddenHttpMethodFilter();

    return new Filter[]{delegatingFilterProxy, characterEncodingFilter, openEntityManagerInViewFilter,
            hiddenHttpMethodFilter};
}

}

EDIT 2:

Here is the mapping of the URL:

INFO - questMappingHandlerMapping - Mapped "{[/admin/news/save],methods=[POST],params=[],headers=[],consumes=[],produces=[],custom=[]}" onto public java.lang.String com.davidmogar.alsa.web.admin.news.NewsController.saveNews(com.davidmogar.alsa.dto.news.NewsDto,org.springframework.validation.BindingResult,org.springframework.ui.Model)

Answer 1

Your request from your error message says:

GET /admin/news/save HTTP/1.1 Host: myserver:8080 Accept:

It should be a POST as you've only configured your controller /admin/news/save to handle POST

@RequestMapping(value = "/save", method = RequestMethod.POST)

Are you sure you've listed the correct error message? Your jsp/html code looks correct, how are you submitting the form?

Answer 2

Turns out that the problem was caused by a bad configuration. I had to rewrite the application initializer to make it work but I'm not sure yet about what was the problem. Here is the new initializer:

public class WebAppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    private static final String CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_ENCODING = "UTF-8";
    private static final String CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_NAME = "characterEncoding";
    private static final String CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_URL_PATTERN = "/*";

    private static final String DISPATCHER_SERVLET_NAME = "dispatcher";
    private static final String DISPATCHER_SERVLET_MAPPING = "/";

    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext rootContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
        rootContext.register(ApplicationContext.class);

        configureDispatcherServlet(servletContext, rootContext);
        EnumSet<DispatcherType> dispatcherTypes = EnumSet.of(DispatcherType.REQUEST,     DispatcherType.FORWARD);
        configureCharacterEncodingFilter(servletContext, dispatcherTypes);
        servletContext.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(rootContext));
    }

    private void configureDispatcherServlet(ServletContext servletContext, WebApplicationContext rootContext) {
        ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher = servletContext.addServlet(
                DISPATCHER_SERVLET_NAME,
                new DispatcherServlet(rootContext)
        );
        dispatcher.setLoadOnStartup(1);
        dispatcher.addMapping(DISPATCHER_SERVLET_MAPPING);
    }

    private void configureCharacterEncodingFilter(ServletContext servletContext, EnumSet<DispatcherType> dispatcherTypes) {
        CharacterEncodingFilter characterEncodingFilter = new CharacterEncodingFilter();
        characterEncodingFilter.setEncoding(CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_ENCODING);
        characterEncodingFilter.setForceEncoding(true);
        FilterRegistration.Dynamic characterEncoding = servletContext.addFilter(CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_NAME, characterEncodingFilter);
        characterEncoding.addMappingForUrlPatterns(dispatcherTypes, true, CHARACTER_ENCODING_FILTER_URL_PATTERN);
    }

}