Martin Cooper wrote:
IMHO, dispatch actions, whatever flavour, are a bad idea in the first
place. They are essentially second-level controllers. What for? You
already have a perfectly good controller in the Struts ActionServlet,
so why have your own additional levels of controller below that? It
only complicates the mechanism by which an incoming request is handed
off to the relevant body of code, and confuses people trying to
understand how the application works.
The problem that dispatch actions are primarily related to, Martin, is
determining which submit or image type was pressed when a form is
submitted. The problem is that you have to find out what the parameter
is (it could be various things) and not what the value of a parameter
is. The controller is not set up for this. The controller cannot do
this. I agree that the usual way of doing this confuses people. Other
ways, using Button classes in ActionForms, for example, which I have
discussed at length elsewhere, is a really heavy and slow solution. I
find SimpleDispatchAction or the associated ImageTagUtil, which does not
use Action code at all clear and good ways to do this. You cannot avoid
the problem. The problem is real. How do you solve it? JavaScript?
Given the available solutions I have seen in Struts, which are:
LookupDispatchAction, Button classes outside the ActionForm, Button
class as an inner class in the ActionForm, ImageTagUtil, and
SimpleDispatchAction, I vastly prefer the last two. That's why I coded
them, of course, so I am prejudiced.
As for which of SimpleDA, MappingDA, FubarDA, whatever, is the best,
all I have to say is that exposing the names of non-trivial Java
methods in URLs, and so visible outside the container, makes me very
queasy from a security perspective. So if I was forced to use a
dispatch action, I would certainly choose one that did not rely on a
query string parameter to specify the method name.
I am not sure what exposed methods you are talking about. This is not
required at all. Thanks for you contribution to this. I am glad you
weighed in. It is impossible to tell what silent people think.
Michael McGrady
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