Hello.
I tried my best before posting this and searched through the archives, but
couldn't find anything on this.
I recently came across a team which was doing something which seemed a
little "weird" more from a designer's (purist?) perspective.
After processing a request, the Action would simply return a null
ActionForward, like so: return (null);
One of the scenarios why/where they were doing this was, they needed to
write to the response directly. (For eg, returning the contents of a file
dynamically)
Also, the behavior they are expecting is, that by simply returning a null,
the page stays on the browser/client, and the returned response, may be
opened in another window, depending on the content-type returned.
Questions that I would like to ask are:
A. Is this the right way to be using Struts? In my opinion, this kind of
procssing should really be handled using simple servlets (along with other
helper classes) rather than Struts-Action-type classes.
B. Is Struts intended to be used as above, by returning a null action
forward?
By design, when a method has a return type R, that becomes part of
the contract, and the caller may typically assume that to be the returned
type. Yes, checking for nulls would be a good thing - and necessary. But, it
becomes the responsibility of the implementor to adhere to that contract.
However, from the point of view of someone only looking at the
Action which returns a null, things will be very fuzzy unless they know how
Struts is likely to handle it: some folks may assume, it could result in an
exception while others may think it is perfectly ok.
What is a better way to achieve the same thing?
Any thoughts and discussion much appreciated.
Rgds,
Saurabh Bobde
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