Chris, I'm facing the same problems as you are. Please take a look at my post from 08/31/06: "[magnolia-user] RequestDispatcher forward problems in Magnolia 2.1.5 public instance". You'll notice the similarity :).
My thoughts on your questions: 1. I'm trying to understand if forwards bypass Magnolia's filter mechanism. I added <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher> and <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher> elements to all the <filter-mapping> elements in my web.xml file to make sure that the filters get called. I'm also going to try to recompile Magnolia code and go step-by-step thru the process in a debug mode to better understand what is going on. 2. I agree with you. We can't always use redirects. 3. I think this is a problem with Struts and a lot of people ask this question on the Struts mailing list (regardless of Magnolia). I hope we are going to be able to create more dynamic action mappings with Struts 2, but until then I don't think we can do much about it. The approach we took was to let Magnolia handle all the pages that do not require communication with the business layer with its own "controller" mechanism. However if there is a user interaction thru forms then we submit the forms to Struts actions which then in turn forward the request to the business layer. Once the business layer is done processing we redirect or forward to a Magnolia page. So basically we use Magnolia just like we would use any other "view" technology, except that we don't have Struts action mappings for every page on the site. 4. This sounds like rewriting Magnolia :). Please let me know if you find solutions to these questions. I will keep the list up-to-date with my progress. Thanks. Nikola ---------------------------------------------------------------- for list details see http://www.magnolia.info/en/magnolia/developer.html ----------------------------------------------------------------
