Struts Novice: Using Action/ActionForms?

[gilgantic]

Few random questions about Struts:
(Note: I left out ActionServlet and Model classes out of my questions)
1. Should every JSP have one "ActionForm" and "Action" class associated with it?
2. Is Action-to-Action (Action Chaining) possible? If so, is it a good practice?
3. Is the normal flow JSP (POST)-> Action -> ActionForward -> ActionForm -> JSP?

 

[Sudsy]

Few random questions about Struts:
(Note: I left out ActionServlet and Model classes out of my questions)
1. Should every JSP have one "ActionForm" and "Action" class associated with it?
2. Is Action-to-Action (Action Chaining) possible? If so, is it a good practice?
3. Is the normal flow JSP (POST)-> Action -> ActionForward -> ActionForm -> JSP?

Start here:
<http://www.sudsy.net/technology/struts-arch.html>
Then read the other articles in the same family.
To answer your questions:
1. Not necessarily. That's not ducking the question, BTW. You might have
a search facility included on the page which would submit to a
different action.
2. Certainly possible but you'd have to carefully consider the potential
for side-effects.
3. No. POST->ActionForm->Action->ActionForward->JSP. The article I cited
includes a nice flow-chart.

 

[Larry]

See below...

Few random questions about Struts:
(Note: I left out ActionServlet and Model classes out of my questions)

1. Should every JSP have one "ActionForm" and "Action" class associated

with it?
Normally, yes. If your JSP has a <form> tag and POST, then you should have
an ActionForm for validation of the form data and an Action to process the
form.

2. Is Action-to-Action (Action Chaining) possible? If so, is it a good

practice?
An Action class is just a hybrid Servlet, so and Action class can call
another action class. Typically, you would call another JSP to display
results, etc. We have used Actions to call another Action in special cases
(like passing data from a process type Action to an Action that generates a
list of that data).

3. Is the normal flow JSP (POST)-> Action -> ActionForward ->

ActionForm -> JSP?
The processing flow is JSP -> ActionServlet -> ActionForm -> Action -> JSP.
ActionServlet (the Controller) is called behind-the-scenes via your mapping
in struts-config.xml, which in turn calls your ActionForm. The ActionForm
(just a JavaBean container for data) must be loaded with the data from your
JSP so the Action can "execute" it.