title: Using Spring MVC is it possible to define filtering methods within controllers themselves
body: <p>I know that using Spring MVC it is possible to annotate an entire controller class with a RequestMapping annotation. It is also possible to annotate separate methods with Requestmapping, so that each of their request mappings is relative to the request mapping of the entire class.</p>
  
  <p>It would be great if then I could assign one method of the controller, as a some sort of per-controller filter, which gets executed before every corresponding action method of the given method. Is it possible, or I should keep to the existing way of using a separate Filter class for that (which is something that could be avoided I hope)</p>