Hi,
We have a bit of dilemma on our project, and I want to get some feedback
from other Struts developers on whether or not what we are thinking of
doing goes against Struts best practices. We are using Struts 1.2 and
all our Action inherit from a CommonAction which extends
MappingDispatchAction, with each of them providing a show (forwards to
the JSP) and submit (updates the model) methods. We have noticed that
each of our show method has a lot in common with all the other show
methods, so are considering what the best way would be to factor this
into the CommonAction.
Currently we have something akin to this in each show method in each
Action
public ActionForward show(ActionMapping mapping,
ActionForm form,
HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse reponse) throws Exception {
log.debug(">> show");
MapBackedForm bean = (MapBackedForm) form;
// Audit logging, log the details of the user and their
requested action
// Security check, check they are allowed to execute the action
// Set up page header details from model
String destination = "success";
// Execute specific action code which results in destination
being updated
log.debug("<< show");
return mapping.findForward(destination);
}
We are considering making changes to our CommonAction so that the
MappingDispatchAction would execute the show method on it, and it would
in turn call a method on our subclass, e.g.
CommonAction.java
public final ActionForward show(ActionMapping mapping,
ActionForm form,
HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
log.debug(">> show");
MapBackedForm bean = (MapBackedForm) form;
// Audit logging, log the details of the user and their
requested action
// Security check, check they are allowed to execute the action
// Set up page header details from model
// Execute specific action code
String destination = show(bean, session);
log.debug("<< show");
return mapping.findForward(destination);
}
public abstract String show(MapBackedForm form, HttpSession session)
throws Exception;
Then each action would implement our 2 parameter show method, and return
a String which could be passed to the ActionMapping by the CommonAction
superclass. This would significantly simplify the code in our Action
classes, reducing repetition between each one, and ensuring that they
each follow all the required auditing and security checks.
I'm wondering if it's considered a bad idea to have the
MappingDispatchAction's dispatch method invoke a call on the superclass
which in turn delegates to the subclass after executing all the common
stuff, because all our subclasses would have a different method
signature than that which is standard in Struts. Or is it acceptable to
do this because our CommonAction class will insulate us from any
potential changes to Struts which would affect this method signature.
Has anyone else done anything similar, or are we totally missing the
point on this one and there's a much neater way of doing it?
Note: we would also change our submit method so that it followed the new
signature above. It shares the same duplication of code.
Thanks
Steve
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