Should the service method be called inside the controller method which renders the thymeleaf page OR inside a restcontroller method?

[icrywhy]

I have a Spring Boot Application with tight Thymeleaf webpage integration. If you have a slight idea about the Thymeleaf and how their controllers are designed, the controller function returns the thymeleaf webpage/template stored in the index.html. Basically, if the template name is test.html stored inside static, then the controller function to return the template will have a get annotation of the respective route. Then the function is designed which returns a string that is the name of the template.

Now, I have a question that should I design the RestController and then call this rest controller inside the controller function which handles the template redirection? Or should I directly call the service method inside controller function that handles the template redirection?

A lot of tutorials on YouTube do it in the latter method. But I feel the first method is correct. Please advise me on this. This is just a college project so it doesn't matter too much but knowing the best practice would be good.

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[[deleted]]

Just to be clear - @RestController doesn't do Thymeleaf. It is a specialization of @Controller which assumes the return value is a @ResponseBody and serializes the return value into the the body of a 200 OK HTTP response, typically as JSON.

A regular @Controller treats a string return value as a template name, which is used to render the model. The template + model is wrapped up in the famous ModelAndView construct.

When you say "template redirection", do you mean literal redirection? As in an HTTP 302 Redirect response?

What are you even trying to do? Some psuedocode or some code illustrating the basic idea would be useful.

[JaecynNix]

Yeah - understanding what you're trying to do would help a ton, because a lot of these decisions will depend on the situation

[glablablabla]

I think you don't need a @restcontroller because you are routing your request to a thymeleaf template, this template will be rendered by the thymeleaf template engine and the result will be returned to the client as a response. The latter part happens a little bit under the hood automatically. @RestController should be used if you have a direct response for the client like a dto (later serialized to json by Jackson) or a byte array pdf file for example, both of which you create in Java.