In controllers its often necessary to find out if the controller is being pre-executed or not. In order to take different actions. This can be done by testing if the http method is POST, but that might not be specific enough since a POST can happen to the page for other reasons. It's also possible to test for it by looking at the state kept by the pre-execution mechanism. But there should be a recommended and documented way of finding out.

Possibly also as an argument directly to controllers, for instance:

@RequestMapping("/contactform")
public String handleRequest(ExecutionStatus executionStatus)