Thanks Joe, that is indeed what I am doing. I am handling a few actions in a single Action class, but parameterizing on my own rather than using the MappingDispatchAction. The reason is that the O'Reilly Struts book led me to believe that if you want to use the DispatchAction class, or the LookupDispatchAction class, you have to put the "method" parameter into your requests. Please correct me if that is wrong. But I don't like that. Is the MappingDispatchAction different from those (my book doesn't seem to cover it)? I prefer to use a switch (the if-else block you describe), to the chagrin of the OO purists, if it means I can keep the URLs the user sees looking the way I want (I never much liked query strings). My Action classes are not so course-grained as to become error prone -- my parameter values are the likes of "add", "update" and "delete".
"MappingDispatchAction" is marked "since Struts 1.2" This would explain why the O'Reilly book doesn't cover it.
I think we had independently devised a similar strategy here, which leads me to think it's been around longer than I recall.
I think MappingDispatchAction is just what you want... http://struts.apache.org/api/org/apache/struts/actions/MappingDispatchAction.html
Joe
What do you think?
Thanks, Erik
Joe Germuska wrote:
> I am parameterizing an Action via the "parameter" attribute to the
action element in struts-config.xml. The Java code in the Action class refers to the possible parameter values using String constants instead of using literal values. However, these same parameter values are simply hardcoded in struts-config.xml. So if I change the values of the constants, I have to change struts-config.xml, and vice-versa. Is there
> an easy way to have the values for these constants in one place?
If you describe somewhat more what you're doing with the parameters inside the action, we might be able to suggest an alternative implementation. For example, if you're doing some kind of conditional checking:
if (MY_CONSTANT1.equals(mapping.getParameter())) { ... } else if (MY_CONSTANT2.equals(mapping.getParameter())) { ... }
you might instead be able to use the MappingDispatchAction, which would encode the Java side of your values as method names instead of as String constants and eliminate the need to test the parameter against the constant.
http://struts.apache.org/api/org/apache/struts/actions/MappingDispatchAction.html
Joe
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "In fact, when I die, if I don't hear 'A Love Supreme,' I'll turn back; I'll know I'm in the wrong place."
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