title: Spring: controller inheritance using @Controller annotation
body: <p>I'd like to be able to create a base controller in my Spring app that, among other things, determines if a user is a registered user or not.  This base controller, following the template design pattern, would contain an abstract protected method that controller subclasses would implement. </p>
  
  <p>The abstract method would have passed to it an instance of User, registered or otherwise.  However, I have no idea how I would do this since it seems that by using controllers purely using the @Controller annotation each controller is free to define their request handling method however they like.</p>
  
  <p>Would creating some sort of user service class that is injected into each controller and used to validate a user be one way to get around this?  This begs the question (at least for me) how does such a controller get a hold of a HttpServletRequest or the Session object?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>