I have been trying to more closely follow the discussions on Struts use of Chain and have a few comments and questions on mechanisms for users to provide custom ActionContext impl.
It seems that the current mechanism is to extend the ComposableRequestProcessor. First, I think having to extend the ComposableRequestProcessor is cumbersome and not in step with the benefits of using Chain ... a major of point, IMO, of using Chain is that we don't have to extend the request processor to add functionality. That being said, it seems like the most natural place, if implemented by Struts, would be the controller element. After all, the catalogName comes from the controllerConfig.
But to be honest, I think it would be cool if something like this could be handled in the chain-config.
<catalog name="struts"> <chain name="servlet-standard" context="com.foo.MyActionContext"> ...
Of course this would mean changes to the Command interface ... etc. -- Perhaps I will bring this up on the commons-dev list ...
Well, I did some things with context wrapping first which were more along these lines: the ActionContext was created when the "process-action" lookup chain was looked up, using the WrappingLookupCommand and the ContextWrapper class -- these are still in SVN, although they are no longer being used.
It seems important to guarantee that the Context being used is an ActionContext, which is one reason why right now it's happening in the RequestProcessor. Also, it seems possible that one would want to do more than just instantiate a Context -- one might also want to populate it with certain properties in a consistent way. Sure, you could do the population with a command, I guess.
However, on the current parallel thread "Storing current ActionContext in ThreadLocal", my last post acknowledged some reasons why changing the mechanism for getting an ActionContext. I think now is a good time to have this discussion on either thread!
I'd be happy to move the stuff which is not being used in Struts into the commons-chain core if people see a use, whether or not it becomes how we set up the ActionContext.
Joe
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction" -The Ex
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