Sounds really good to me, +1 for it. What would be the target release if it gets done?
musachy On 5/27/07, Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In Struts 2.1 (and XWork 2.1), I'm thinking about reworking how we process urls and convert them to actions. Specifically, I want to make it possible for the Struts 2 dispatcher filter to potentially examine every request, and if no action is found, pass control down the filter chain. The goal of this improvement would be so that Struts 2 could intercept /* but not look for any particular file extension. This would allow a Struts 2 app to be able to use the .html extension, but still support static html files. The primary use case I have in mind is a friendly restful application. This app has urls like: http://example.com/book/War+and+Peace Only you want to serve up different views of the action simultaneously: http://example.com/book/War+and+Peace.xml http://example.com/book/War+and+Peace.html http://example.com/book/War+and+Peace.json The most natural way to do this is to use the extension. However, if you have Struts 2 handle all requests, currently, you can't then have it serve any static files (Dojo, css, etc) and you can't use your web application server to serve static files either (html, css, js, etc). The workflow I envision goes like this: 1. Filter matches all URLs (/*) 2. ActionMapper determines the action name and namespace, if either a) an extension is defined or b) all extensions are configured to be processed 3. The _dispatcher_ tries to find an ActionConfig from the Configuration (currently this happens in the ActionProxy) 4. If an ActionConfig can be found (even trying the UnknownHandler), the request is processed as usual by Struts 2 as an action 5. Otherwise, the filter sees if it is an internal Struts 2 resource to return and does so 6. Otherwise, the filter lets the request go down the chain To match the example urls above, you would configure Struts 2 to not use an action extension. Then, in your action, you could match urls that include the extension: <action name="book/*.html" class="com.example.BookAction"> <param name="id">{1}</param> <result>viewBook.jsp</result> </action> From here, we could later do interesting things like: <action name="book/*.*" class="com.example.BookAction"> <param name="id">{1}</param> <result name="success-html">viewBook-html.jsp</result> <result name="success-xml" type="xstream" /> <result name="success-json" type="xstream-json" /> </action> Using a dynamic proxy for the Action that manipulated the returned result based on the url extension. I'm getting ahead of myself, but you get the idea of where I'm going with this. Thoughts? Don
-- "Hey you! Would you help me to carry the stone?" Pink Floyd
