I have a controller with request mapping as @RequestMapping("/**")
What does it mean?
If I want to exclude certain url pattern from the above mapping how would I do that?
Could someone please shed some light on it?
Your URL will intercept all requests matching '/**'. Depending on where you are defining this I am not sure why you would want to do this. On class level this should define the base path while on method level it should be refined to the specific function.
If you would like to exclude a pattern you could define another controller that is ordered at a higher priority to the controller specifying '/**'
Here are 2 good references from spring source: