hi,
this sounds very interesting to me.
So, if you don't mind, i'd like to take a look.....
regards
stefan werner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roland Huss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 10:49 PM
Subject: Extensions to Struts
> Ahoi,
>
> first all thanx for this real fantastic framework, excellent work!.
> We here at ConSol are developing a web frontend for our helpdesk
> software based on struts and for the time being we have about 30
> actions, 35 custom tags, 110 JSP-Pages (without any explicite java
> code!) and appr. 20k lines of Java code and it turned out that struts
> was a great support from the very beginning.
>
> In course of the development during the last three month, we made some
> extensions, which we would happily contribute to struts.
>
> Our extensions are listed below briefly. If there's some interest
> in some of them, please leave a note (note that I will be absent till
> wednesday in a week, so don't expect a response before)
>
> * Followups. Followups are a simple mechanism for an action to return
> to the place before it was called. Therefore we implemented a
> FollowupStack which is passed around in URLs and Forms (as hidden
> parameters). An action only needs simply to call "getFollowup()" in its
> perform() method to get a forward to the previous action. (Therefore
> FormTag and Action was extended).
>
> * Action documentation. For documentation of actions, we introduced
> three new javadoc tags: @input (input parameters expected by this
> action in its request) , @output (results put into request scope)
> and @forward (possible forwards of this action). To support these
> new tags we've written two javadoc Doclets: The first is extending
> the standard doclet for rendering an HTML table in the class
> documentation in javadoc. The other one creates XML-output, which we
> use with an XSL stylesheet to convert it to the stylebook DTD for
> the online documentation.
>
> * Hidden Parameters. Our extension of Action has an
> "addHiddenParameter()" method which put hidden parameters into
> request scope which our subclassed FormTag renders as
> HTML-Tags. With this method it is very easy to push parameters around
> to several actions (without polluting session scope).
>
> * Image Buttons. This an extension to SubmitTag for rendering image
> buttons and handling enabled/disabled buttons based on the existance
> of some object stored in request scope. Our actions can check for the
> trigger of a submit button regardless whether it was submitted as a
> submit button or an image-map.
>
> * Extra parameters in URLs. Our extended "Action" gives subclasses a
> change to append extra parameters to a forward by overriding a
> "getExtraParameters()" which will be appended to a forward.
>
> * From action to JSP. Not really an extension, but it proved for us to be
> very useful to stick to the simple paradigm, that a page is only
> accessed via an action and any JSP-Page is only referenced via an
> action. JSP pages are really only used for rendering the result
> calculated by the previous action, which passes them to the JSP page
> by putting them into request scope. Though it might look rather
> restrictive, this design descision proved to be very useful mainly
> due to its simplicity.
>
> Well, thats all I remember for the moment. We developed some custom
> tags, which might prove to be useful on its own (and not only for our
> application), but that's another story.
>
> cu....
> --
> ...roland huss
> consol.de
>
