Spring Controller method executed twice - spring

Question

I have integrated Spring Security with Spring MVC and seeing strange behaviour. Every method in the Controller is executed twice for the same request. I googled for it quite a bit but didn't help much. The closest I could find is this http://forum.springsource.org/archive/index.php/t-83158.html I tried the suggestions without any success.
Here is my web.xml :
<servlet>
<servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>0</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<filter>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<context-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>
/WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/security-app-context.xml
/WEB-INF/application-context.xml
</param-value>
</context-param>
Here is relevant part of applicationcontext.xml :
<context:component-scan base-package="com.*" />
<context:spring-configured/>
<mvc:annotation-driven />
<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:/conf/myConfig.properties" />
<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />
The servlet-context.xml only has mapping for the InternalResourceViewResolver
The security-context.xml is as follows :
<http pattern="/resources/**" security="none"/>
<http auto-config="false" create-session="stateless" entry-point-ref="loginUrlAuthenticationEntryPoint" >
<intercept-url pattern="/**" access="IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/j_spring_security_check" access="IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/accessdenied" access="IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/login" access="IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY"/>
<intercept-url pattern="/logout" access="ROLE_USER"/>
<custom-filter before="SECURITY_CONTEXT_FILTER" ref="cookieSecurityContextFilter" />
<custom-filter position="LOGOUT_FILTER" ref="logoutfilter" />
<custom-filter position="FORM_LOGIN_FILTER" ref="authenticationFilter" />
<custom-filter after="EXCEPTION_TRANSLATION_FILTER" ref="customExceptionFilter" />
</http>
<beans:bean id="logoutfilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.authentication.logout.LogoutFilter">
<beans:constructor-arg value="/"/>
<beans:constructor-arg ref="customLogouthandler"/>
</beans:bean>
And then further mapping for the filters.
Am I doing something wrong in the configuration that could lead to the controller being called twice. I have checked the logs and the beans are instantiated only once. Please help.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Just in case someone stumbles on this post and solution posted here thinking it will fix the duplicate requests, please first check if it is your browser/rest client making the additional call.
I wasted many hours trying to configure app and servlet contexts "after seeing the first suggested solution", until I figured it was the rest client on certain browsers (Chrome) creating an additional request for "GET requests on image resources". Curl showed only one method execution.
However, I do agree that it is a good practice to separate controller specific beans and their required Spring beans into servlet-context and keep all common beans in app-context. This is especially important if you have multiple Spring dispatcher servlet- in your web.xml.
Elaborating the previous answer:
You can either define both component-scan and mvc in the same context file to keep it simple.
app-context.xml:
<context:component-scan base-package="..." />
<mvc:annotation-driven />
...
Or separate them as follows:
app-context.xml:
<context:component-scan base-package="....">
<context:exclude-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation"/>
<context:exclude-filter expression="org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ControllerAdvice" type="annotation"/>
<context:exclude-filter expression="org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler" type="annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
...
servlet-context.xml:
<context:component-scan base-package="...">
<context:include-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation"/>
<context:include-filter expression="org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ControllerAdvice" type="annotation"/>
<context:include-filter expression="org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler" type="annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
<mvc:annotation-driven />
...

Answer 2

I would try moving <mvc:.. elements to servlet-context.xml, maybe having it on applicationContext.xml causes you to have duplicate dispatcher servlet (although beans are only created once)
Scan all components except #Controller on applicationContext.xml by using <context:exclude-filter... Likewise scan only #Controller on servlet-context.xml using <context:include-filter..