You raise a good point. Unfortunately, only one parameter can be passed through ActionMapping. DispatchChainAction really needs an "allowedCommands" parameter to specify what commands would be allowed. Perhaps we could use the new set/getProperty methods available in ActionConfig where allowedCommands could be specified.
Actually, the main reason for implementing the getProperty(String) extension to ActionConfig was for the Chain Actions to be able to pass more parameters in. I don't use the request parameter dispatching (in fact, this seems to me a pretty good argument against it even outside of chain), but for the version which is configured using the ActionMapping, you need to be able to pass in the name of the catalog as well as the command. My thought was that the ChainAction would be updated to use two properties in the ActionMapping instead of the one "parameter" value. It really isn't right to assume that the commands are in any specific catalog.
I suppose that using this facility to set the name of the catalog might provide at least a layer of obscurity, if you only dispatched to commands in a private chain - but you are still exposing the names of valid commands in the request values. Since I don't use the dispatching, I would defer to someone else to decide whether that class should use a different param to get the catalog name, or should get the catalog name from the ActionMapping, or something else...
Joe
Don
Benedict, Paul C wrote:I noticed in Struts 1.3 there is a DispatchChainAction, and the parameter attribute specifies the name of the chain to execute. Would somebody consider that a security hole? It seems like anyone could arbitrarily execute any chain command in the entire Struts app if they knew it -- unlike a normal DispatchAction whose parameter is only relevant for that Action class.
Also, I hope there will be a MappingDispatchChainAction too. The MappingDispatchAction is, in my opinion, the absolute best feature of Struts 1.2 and secures the internals of the app better (i.e., not exposing method names to the world). However, it seems that it would be impossible to implement (currently) since the parameter attribute is already in use for the chain command.
Thanks, Paul
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction" -The Ex
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