Spring.Web.Mvc builds on top of the Spring.NET IoC container. Object Definitions that make up a typical Spring.Web.Mvc-enabled application are configured with the same standard Spring.NET XML configuration syntax used for non web objects. To integrate with the ASP.NET MVC runtime you need to make a few modifications to your Web.config file and your Global.asax.

The instantiation and configuration of the Spring.NET IoC container by the Spring.Web.Mvc infrastructure is wholly transparent to application developers, who typically never have to explicitly instantiate and configure an IoC container manually (by, for example, using the new operator in C#). To effect the transparent bootstrapping of the IoC container, you need to modify the primary Application class in the Global.asax so as to derive it from the special SpringMvcApplication class as shown in the following snippet:

public class MvcApplication : SpringMvcApplication
{
}

Note that the SpringMvcApplication class is abstract so that developers may only use it indirectly as a superclass of their own global application class in the Global.asax of their ASP.NET MVC applications.

After the Global.asax is modified as indicated above, you also need to define a root application context by adding a Spring.NET configuration section to your Web.config file. The final configuration file should resemble the following; your exact configuration may vary in particulars and the following snippet illustrates only the Spring-specfic entries and excludes the remainder of the content (typically) required by ASP.NET MVC.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>

    <configSections>
        <sectionGroup name="spring">
          <section name="context" type="Spring.Context.Support.MvcContextHandler, Spring.Web.Mvc3"/>
        </sectionGroup>
    </configSections>

    <spring>
        <context>
            <resource uri="file://~/Config/Controllers.xml"/>
            <resource uri="file://~/Config/Filters.xml"/>
            <resource uri="file://~/Config/Production/Services.xml"/>
            <resource uri="file://~/Config/Production/Dao.xml"/>
        </context>
    </spring>

</configuration>

Notes about the preceding configuration:

The default behavior, settings, ASP.NET MVC start-up related and Spring.NET container-configuration behaviors can be modified and controlled by overriding various methods of the SpringMvcApplication in your own derived instance. The following section describes these overridable methods and their existing behavior provided in the base SpringMvcApplication class. Please note that if you choose to override any of these methods and do not subsequently invoke the base SpringMvcApplication class' implementation of that same method, then you are completely responsible for ensuring that the underlying reponsibilities of that method in the base class are satisfied by your overloaded implementation. Without either ensuring this or invoking the base class implementation within your overridden method, the underlying behavior of the ASP.NET MVC integration with Spring.NET is unlikley to function as intended.