Doing pre-checks before calling controller in Spring MVC

I recently started working on a Spring MVC project which uses Spring Security.

I had to do some pre-checks before user's request gets to the controller.

This is what I want to achieve, like I have worked a lot with Struts Framework. And in Struts we can extend all the action classes to a superclass let's say BaseAction and then write some validation here so that they gets called before calling the subclass methods.

I would like to achieve same thing here but don't know how to start.

I cannot use filters as I need to make database calls and web-service calls in pre-checks.

I just need some advice.

You can implement an interceptor using HandlerInterceptorAdapter.

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/reference/mvc.html#mvc-handlermapping-interceptor

Configuring the applicationContext in XML.

<mvc:interceptors>
    <bean class="my.package.MyInterceptor" />
</mvc:interceptors>

The interceptor.

public class MyInterceptor extends HandlerInterceptorAdapter {

    public boolean preHandle(
        HttpServletRequest request, 
        HttpServletResponse response, Object handler) {

        // your logic
        return true;
    }
}

Returns true if the execution chain should proceed with the next interceptor or the handler itself. Else, DispatcherServlet assumes that this interceptor has already dealt with the response itself.