Capturing multi-part paths in Spring controllers

A while back I worked on a Spring Boot application that stores and works with Swagger files. It has a controller that needs to capture file paths at the end of request URIs.

We need to extract three variables: project, repo and path, where path may traverse multiple layers. Some examples:

This naive attempt at a solution does not work:

@GetMapping(path = "/swagger/{project}/{repo}/{path}")
public ResponseEntity<String> swaggerFile(@PathVariable("project") String project,
                                          @PathVariable("repo") String repo,
                                          @PathVariable("path") String path) {

With this, when using the first URI, the path variable gets the value swagger without the file extension. The second URI does not match at all.

The file extension can be captured by using a regular expression, for example:

@GetMapping(path = "/swagger/{project}/{repo}/{path:.+}")

Here, given the first URI, the path variable gets the value swagger.yaml as desired. But the second URI still does not match at all.

There is no simple way to extract a deep path into a single variable. I think this is because the Spring classes split the path into segments using slash characters before matching each segment with a regular expression.

A working solution is to get the entire path from the servlet request object and parse it locally.

@GetMapping(path = "/swagger/{project}/{repo}/**")
public ResponseEntity<String> swaggerFile(@PathVariable("project") String project,
                                          @PathVariable("repo") String repo,
                                          HttpServletRequest request) {
    String prefix = String.format("/swagger/%s/%s", project, repo);
    String path = request.getRequestURI().substring(prefix.length() + 2);
    // Use path
}