RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes() and accessing HTTP Session

Question

Need to access HTTP session for fetching as well storing some information.I am using Spring-MVC for my application and i have 2 options here.

1. User Request/ Session in my Controller method and do my work
2. Use RequestContextHolde to access Session information.

I am separating some calculation logic from Controller and want to access Session information in this new layer and for that i have 2 options

1. Pass session or Request object to other method in other layer and perform my work.
2. use RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes() to access request/ session and perform my work.

I am not sure which is right way to go? with second approach, i can see that method calling will be more clean and i need not to pass request/ session each time.

Answer 1

I would approach this problem a bit differently. Let's assume you need only an attribute "attr1" from the session. So what you actually should do is to get this attribute in @Controller pass it to your calculation logic class (@Service), return the result of the calculation back to @Controller and store it in session. Thanks to that your calculation logic will not be independent from a web layer (HttpSession), hence reusable.

E.g.:

@Controller
public class AController {

    @Autowired
    private SomeCalculationService someCalculationService;

    @RequestMapping(value = "/", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    @ResponseBody
    public Account accounts(HttpSession httpSession) {      
        MyData myData = httpSession.getAttribute("attr1");
        SomeResult someResult = someCalculationService.calculate(myData);
        httpSession.setAttribute("attr2", someResult);
    }
}