Most of us now find it convenient to create a second set of "View" Actions. These Actions work as "page controllers". Instead of forwarding to the JSP, we forward to these Actions instead. These Actions can then prepare the request with whatever "chrome" the page may need.
It's a good practice to define an ActionMapping for every presentation page in the application, whether it's a server page or HTML, local or remote, even if it just forwards out to a page. If you need to add an Action class later, or switch in a server page for a static page, you can do that without changing anything else.
In Strut 1.1, I find it useful to separate the business Actions and the view Actions into separate configuration files, and may give the View Actions their own virtual path. So there might be a /SelectPermitAction and a /view/SelectPermitAction.
There is talk of adding a specific extension point for a "view Action" as part of the ActionForward construct, but AFAIK, no one's rolled up their sleeves and given it a try. This would save a trip through the container, and simplify cases where you want to redirect to another business Action.
HTH, Ted.
Keith Pemberton wrote:
Experts,
I'm struggling with using the View Helper pattern. In my logical way of thinking, when a request to any jsp page is made, then the request goes to the ActionServlet. The ActionServlet then looks up the appropriate view helper initiallizes it with any parameters that were passed in through the request. The ActionServlet then requests that the view helper put the required java bean object in the request scope and then the servlet forwards to the page that was requested. This doesn't seem to be the case, though, with how struts works. Please correct me if I am wrong, but every link in my jsp pages where the page that I am requesting has content that comes from a java bean (form bean) must be linked to some action component. So, just say that I have an index page where I am displaying only five items at a time out of database that are ranked based on their index number in the database. To get the next five entries from the database I would have to use the struts tags and put an html:link element in the page that pointed to some action class. I, guess, am just looking for an assurance that I am implementing the view helper pattern the correct way according to struts. Any help you can provide would be much appreciated!
Keith Pemberton
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-- Ted Husted, Junit in Action - <http://www.manning.com/massol/>, Struts in Action - <http://husted.com/struts/book.html>, JSP Site Design - <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1861005512>.
"Get Ready, We're Moving Out!!" - <http://www.clark04.com>
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