Wake up and smell the java

In this latest project of mine I was thinking about the various ways to map struts actions. I had done this, a couple of different ways and was wondering if there was a classification out there. And sure enough someone had already done this and instead of paraphrasing, I will just provide the link, here at TSS. Another thing/caveat about using named form-beans accross actions For ex, in your struts-config.xml, if you have a form-bean:

<form-bean name=”xyzForm” type=”package.web.XYZForm” />

and you want to use the same form accross two actions:

<action path=”/processAction” type=”package.web.action.ProcessAction”
parameter=”process”
name=”xyzForm” validate=”true”…..

<action path=”/displayAction” type=”package.web.action.DisplayAction”
parameter=”display”
name=”xyzForm” validate=”false”….

Notice here, I am using the same named form-bean for two actions, in the display action I don’t want to validate the form, but in the process action I want to validate the form. In this case I was in for a surprise, the validate=”true” wasn’t working for the process action. This is because the form params are set only once per form-bean. To overcome this, define two different named form-beans of the same type or if you still want to reuse the form-bean, set validate to true for both actions and within the validate method, based on a parameter decide if you want to validate or not.

My gripe about this generic attribute called ‘parameter’ in the struts action config.
So I have something like:

path=”/logonProcess”
type=”naive.actions.LogonAction”
name=”logonForm”
parameter=”/pages/Logon.jsp”
validate=”true”
Now someone pray tell me what this ‘paramter’ is supposed to do.
I looked up on the Apache site and it says:
“action general purpose configuration parameter”.

Alright, but what is that supposed to mean. Well it means different things to different action type classes, if it is a ForwardAction it can be the url you want the action to be forwarded to. For DispatchAction it is the key to the different method values.  Also you can pass your own parameters that can be available to the action.

Ok, so finally after looking at much examples, I thought I had a basic idea and this was too trivial to actually go about trying. But today out of sheer boredem, I exported the struts-blank.war into Tomcat and got hacking at it. So here goes my tryst with struts:

• 2:15 PM Ok then, I edit struts-config.xml: create a simple logonForm extending DynActionForm, add action logon, map the action to logonForm and a LogonAction class, that I will code in a bit.
• 2:30 PM I create the jsps using the tags.
• 2:40 I get interrupted, they want me to do some work actually.
• 3:30 PM Ok where was I? Right the jsps; I write a simple action class: LogonAction, in which I check the username and password against hard-coded values and if they match, forward the page to success, if not forward to failure.
• 3:35 PM I am all compiled and ready to go, I fire up Tomcat and go to the logon page.
• 3:40PM Hurrah! I can actually see the logon page, I hit submit, the page goes to logon.do, but empty page.
• 3:45 PM I think there might be something wrong in the Action class, so I comment the very cryptic username, password checking logic and just forward the page to success. I fire up Tomcat again.
• Fast Forward: a few iterations, debugs, logs and System.out.println later:
• 4:30 PM Still no luck, also anything I log or write to sysout does not show up in the logs, so probably the action calss is not even getting invoked.
• 4:45 PM I tear out my hair, google for “struts action empty page”, there is something about previous Action API requiring you to implement perform and current ones needing you to implement execute.
• 5:00 PM So, sure enough I am impelmenting perform, I just change this to execute and try again, Hallelujah!, I am strutting away to glory.

Moral of the story when in “Action”, “execute”, do not “perform”.
So much for struts.