Hi, I have a question regarding what the community would consider to be Best Practises when using Struts. I am doing an internal review of our own usage of Struts within our products, and I have constructed an example application to highlight my question(s) and talk around. I would appreciate any feedback, insight or help that the community can offer. I appreciate that this question requires a bit of effort on the readers part ! Hopefully I have explained the context in enough detail to solicit decent responses, but not so detailed as to tire you out ! Most Web Applications perform similar tasks which could be considered generic regardless of domain. I have taken some of these tasks and bundled them into this simple example. The example is a simplification of an application I am building at the moment - a Struts based Wiki called 'ChiKi'. For those who are not aware of what a wiki is, refer to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb <http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb> for details. Given an object that is to manipulated, core tasks that could be performed on that object would include * View * Edit * Save * Create [not considered in example] * Delete [not considered in example] In this example, we have the object is called 'Page' which has 'id' and 'content' as string attributes. I wish to be able to View, Edit, Save, Create and Delete 'Pages'. So here are some of my questions - all implementation details can be found at the end of the email: * given the details of the components and the xml configuration at the end of this email, how does this implementation compare to how you would do it ? i.e. what other ways would people 'configure' to achieve the same end result ? * are there any given Best Practises that could apply ? * other areas to consider could include: * separation: save and edit could be encapsualted in the same action, would you ? * Page & EditForm: essentially the same, how would people avoid duplication ? or would they bother ? * usage of request scope * ... I appreciate that this is a simple example, but I would like to get a feel for how people would do this, and ascertain if there are differing strategies - and the various pros/cons of each strategy. It is my intention to offer up the full blown ChiKi as an example app for Struts development once it is ready, and I would like to be able to take feedback from this post into account. This will hopefully be useful for developers using Struts - it's always helpful to have other ex amples ! and it will certainly be used internally for my developers training/introduction to Struts - as well as actually being used within our development team as a tool - wiki's are great :) [We are about to release v1.0 of our current Struts based application - a large enterprise application globally deployed for a large multinational. I will post more details about this as I'm sure there is interest in Real World developments. Of particular interest may be the results from our Performance testing, the overall Architecture and so on. This may be one of the largest and certainly most complex Struts based applications to go into production, and I would like to share the experience with the community. More details to follow shortly] So thank you for making it this far, and if you have any feedback at all, please let me know. Many thanks Ghoot Emaho Development Team Leader Petrotechnics Ltd <http://www.petrotechnics.co.uk/> In the implementation, I have the following components: * Page.java * simple bean with accessor methods for 'id' and 'content' attributes * ChikiService.java * provides methods getPage(String pageId) and setPage(Page p) to be used by the Actions * View.java * extends Action * accepts 1 request parameter 'pageId' which uniqely identifies the page * requests Page 'pageId' from ChikiService * puts the returned Page object into the request * returns a forward to View.jsp * View.jsp * displays the Page object in the request, using: * <bean:write name="page" property="id" scope="request"/> * <bean:write name="page" property="content" scope="request"/> * provides a hyperlink to 'Edit' this page: * <html:link page="/chiki/edit" paramID="pageId" paramName="page" paramProperty="id" >Edit</html:link> * EditForm.java * simple bean with accessor methods for 'id' and 'content' attributes * identical to the 'Page' object, except it extends ActionForm * Edit.java * extends Action * accepts 1 request parameter 'pageId' which uniqely identifies the page * requests Page 'pageId' from ChikiService * populates EditForm with values from the returned Page Object * returns a forward to Edit.jsp * Edit.jsp * displays the page to be edited. 'id' attribute is a text label and the 'content' is in a text area which the user can edit and then submit to be saved * <html:form action="/save" focus="content"> <html:hidden property="id"/><br> <html:textarea property="content" size="80" rows="23" redisplay="false"/><BR> <html:submit property="submit" value="Save Changes"/> <html:reset/> </html:form> * Submits the EditForm to the 'Save' action for processing * Save.java * extends Action * creates a new Page object based on the EditForm contents * requests the Page be saved by calling ChikiService.setPage(page) with the new page object * puts the new Page object into the request * returns a forward to Save.jsp * Save.jsp * provides a confirmation/preview view of the page with changes applied * displays the Page object in the request, using: * <bean:write name="page" property="id" scope="request"/> * <bean:write name="page" property="content" scope="request"/> * provides a hyperlink to 'View' this page: * <html:link page="/chiki/view" paramID="pageId" paramName="page" paramProperty="id" >View</html:link> Struts Configuration looks like this: <struts-config> <!-- ========== Form Bean Definitions =================================== --> <form-beans> <!-- Edit form bean --> <form-bean name="editForm" type="org.emaho.chiki.event.EditForm"/> </form-beans> <!-- ========== Global Forward Definitions ============================== --> <global-forwards> <forward name="index" path="/index.html"/> <forward name="error" path="/core/error.jsp"/> </global-forwards> <!-- ========== Action Mapping Definitions ============================== --> <action-mappings> <!-- View Page --> <action path="/view" type="org.emaho.chiki.event.View" name="View" scope="request"> <forward name="view" path="/core/view.jsp"/> </action> <!-- Edit Page --> <action path="/edit" type="org.emaho.chiki.event.Edit" name="editForm" scope="request" input="/edit.jsp"> <forward name="edit" path="/core/edit.jsp"/> </action> <!-- Save Page --> <action path="/save" type="org.emaho.chiki.event.Save" name="editForm" scope="request" input="/edit.jsp"> <forward name="save" path="/core/save.jsp"/> </action> </action-mappings> </struts-config>
