You are correct, but in my opinion, these user commands that are placed in the Struts request processing chain should have relevance to your entire application and therefore are appropriate in the global level of the request processing chain. An action is about how to process an individual request, so in my book, these are two separate concerns that should be clearly separated.
There is a middle ground which I have been playing with on and off frequently called "interceptors". In WebWork2, you can define action interceptors that intercept certain actions, defined at a per-action level. With Struts Action Invocation Framework (SAIF) at struts.sf.net/saif , we ported interceptors to pre-chain Struts, but it would be interesting to integrate that work with Struts as it is now. It would be nice to define code that would be executed only before certain groups of actions.
Yeah... I'm just starting to look into some of this fancy JavaScript XMLHttpRequest stuff that Martin's always going off about ;-) and I thought it made sense to be able to define a chain whereby the posted XML gets converted into an object and placed into request scope in a routine fashion. I still don't even have a complete model in my head about what I would need to do to service requests like that, but this seems like a starting point.
It also might be nice if some kind of interceptor could be designed to save people the trouble of copying the default chain-config.xml if they want to add things to the Request Processing chain. I have been thinking in terms of Maven preGoals and postGoals, but I'm not sure what the proper route to implementation would be.
Joe
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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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