Our application requires some action responses to be cacheable and others not. Although the default caching handling of struts can be easily modified by setting the appropriate parameter in web.xml this only affects the overall handling for ALL action responses. Adapting this default behavior to conditional handling based on (extended) action mappings by extending the ActionServlet is currently NOT possible without modifying the ActionServlet source code itself or by overriding its most important (and extensive) process(...) method. Overriding the process(...) method is something I do not prefer: its contains to much code unrelated to this issue. Instead, I added one new (empty) method: processActionMapping(mapping, request, response). By extending the ActionServlet we now handle all mapping specific functionality in an override of this method. The actionservlet also sets the default contentType for ALL action responses to one and only value (default "text/html", modifiable with a parameter in web.xml). Our action mapping extension also allows for override of the default content type and the corresponding response header is then also set by the processActionMapping(...) method. But: this header would be set twice default because the default handling cannot be turned off other than overriding the processContent(..) method with an empty one. Although setting this header more than once is allowed in which only the last set value will actually be output it didn't like that thus implemented an empty override of the processContent(...) method (which I didn't like to do either). I think struts is great as a generic framework and out application would have been much more difficult to build and certainly to maintain without it. The "default" parameters defineable for the actionservlet in web.xml are great for most of the situations, but I think struts should allow conditional handling of these parameters otherwise the "default" values aren't truly default values at all. I thus kindly propose an enhancement for these "nocache" and "content" parameters handling in which they can be conditionally set/processed based on an action mapping in a separate protected method. The current handling could then be implemented in this method and by extending the new method application specific handling can be written. Ate Douma
