Upload files with Spring MVC (Eclipse-based tutorial)

Upload files with Spring MVC (Eclipse-based tutorial)

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Details: Last Updated on 15 December 2012

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This tutorial is about how to implement file upload functionality with Spring MVC framework. To handle file uploads, Spring provides a MultipartResolver bean which is responsible for resolving multipart request. This resolver is working with two file upload libraries:

- Apache Commons File Upload: The bean class is org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver
- COS (com.oreilly.servlet): The bean class is org.springframework.web.multipart.cos.CosMultipartResolver

We need to declare the MultipartResolver bean in Spring’s context file as follows:

For CommonsMultipartResolver:

<bean id="multipartResolver"
	class="org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver">
	<!-- max file size in bytes -->
	<property name="maxUploadSize" value="2000000" />
	<!-- other properties... -->
</bean>

And for CosMultipartResolver:

<bean id="multipartResolver"
	class="org.springframework.web.multipart.cos.CosMultipartResolver">
	<!-- max file size in bytes -->
	<property name="maxUploadSize" value="2000000" />
	<!-- other properties... -->
</bean>

Also we need to add to classpath jar files of the file upload library employed:

- For Apache Commons File Upload: commons-fileupload-VERSION.jar and commons-io-VERSION.jar (Commons File Upload depends on Commons IO).
- For COS: cos.jar

As Apache Commons File Upload is popular and preferred over COS, this tutorial will use it. We will build a Spring MVC application which has an upload form looks like in the following screenshot:

upload form