What is Action Class in Strurts?

Question

In the context of an tag, for instance for a login action, we previously always coded forms as :

 ....

And in the struts.xml we have been using :

content.login
 content.menu
 summary_input
 welcome

This has worked in the past and allowed us to not only use the action="login" to target the execute method of the action, but also to build links to, for instance, login_checkStatus.action to target other, specific methods within the action. I am not sure this Is a common/best practice, I had no prior struts2 experience before joining this company and this is how a lot of the existing functionality is coded. (If this is wrong/there is a better way, please let me know)

Now randomly, this fails to generate the proper action url in the html (it is missing the '.action', which results in a 404 once you post the form)

The only workaround we have found so far is to add the '.action' suffix to the
s:form's action attribute. Before it was always added for us by struts.

So now we are having success with

 ...

I can only assume that this has been affected by the changes related to S2-015 and the wildcard action matching.

Answer 1

Action Class in Struts framework is used to define the business logic it handle the client request prepare the response or tell where the response should be forward, basically its receive the data from the view layer and forward that data to specific business layer or process the data and again forward the processed data to view layer.

For example Action class can create a library object add books to that library object, it can store selected books by specific reader to session.

In Brief we can describe Action as:

• Our Action class is extended by “org.apache.struts.action.Action class”.
• We need to override execute() method of Action class.
• Action servlet select Action class for incoming HTTP Request defined under the action mapping tag in struts config.xml file
• Action class is used to invoke business or data access logic get data from bean and store processed data to bean and return result or errors depending upon the situation,
• Action classes are multi-threaded so we need to carefully handle the action variable as they are not thread safe when working with multi-threaded environment.

How to Use Action Class In simple steps we will see how to use Action class.

• First extend the org.apache.struts.action.Action class.
• Override following method

   public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping,
            ActionForm form,
            HttpServletRequest request,
            HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException

Here we develop our business logic and prepare the response to return the client.

• Then we configure this action to struts config file of our application inside action mapping :

<action-mappings>
<action
      path="/TestAction"
      type="Example.TestAction">
      <forward name="success" path="/ExamplePages/TestAction.jsp"/>
   </action>  
</action-mappings>