Introduction to Struts

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Agenda
 Servlet BackGround
– Servlets, JSP, web.xml
– Request processing flow , issues with Servlets
 StrutsComponents
 HelloWorld Application
 Exercise

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Servlets
 Servlet flow of execution

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JSP
 JSP flow of execution

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Issues with JSP and servlets
 Real issues
– Servlets embed html into code
– JSP embeds code into GUI
– Project time increases
– Not modular
– Reuse is difficult
– Server side programmers are not comfortable with
GUI code and vice versa
– If target of GUI is changed, server side code gets
affected.

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Struts Overview
 MVC architecture for Web based
applications
 Separates view (JSP) from model (java
code).

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Struts overview (Request flow)

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Struts Components -
ActionServlet
 ActionServlet
– This is the main struts class. It is a servlet. An
application that uses struts directs all the
requests to the ActionServlet class by
specifying a url mapping in the web.xml file.

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Struts Components – struts-
config.xml
 Similar to web.xml, this is specified as a
parameter in web.xml
 It contains two broad categories of
information
– Configuration information for struts
– Action-mappings
 Struts-config entries
– Form beans, action-mappings
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Struts Components – Action-
Mappings
 An action mapping entry in the struts
config file maps a url to a model and a
view.
 The model is an action class
 The view is a jsp file

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Struts Components – Action
Classes
 Action classes populate the model when a
request is made – for example if a request is
made to view the details of an employee with a
particular id, then the model will retrieve the
details of the employee using the id.
 Action classes should be written by the
application programmer
 Action classes should extend
org.apache.struts.action.Action

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Struts Components – Action
classes
 Action classes need to override the
following method
 Public ActionForward execute
 Takes following parameters
– ActionMapping mapping
– ActionForm form
– HTTPRequest request
– HTTPResponse response
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Struts Components –
ActionForm
 Action classes need to access to form variables.
In servlets, this is done via
request.getParameter()
 Struts allows the programmer to define a bean
called an ActionForm object. This bean should
contain variables with the same name as the
variables in the form.
 An entry should be made in the form-beans
section of struts-config.xml for this class
 An entry should be made in the action mapping
for this url
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Struts Components –
ActionForm population
mechanism
 When a request arrives, struts checks the struts
config.xml and retrieves the action-mapping
corresponding to the url.
 It checks if there is a name parameter
corresponding to the action mapping
 If there is a name parameter, struts finds out the
corresponding class name from the form bean
entry
 It creates an object of this type.
 It now traverses via all the members of this
object via reflection, looks up corresponding
variables from the request and populates the form 14
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Struts Components – request
flow details
 Tomcat forwards request to ActionServlet
 ActionServlet retrieves action-mapping from
struts-config.xml
 ActionServlet creates Actionform object
 ActionServlet creates Action object
 ActionServlet invokes execute on Action
 Action performs action directly or by delegating
to business logic
 Action creates model and stores it into session
 Action returns a Forward
 Action Servlet retrieves JSP corresponding to
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Forward and forwards to the jsp
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Struts Components – JSP tag
libs
 Strutsprovides a rich set of tag libraries
which can be used in jsp pages
 HTML tag libs can be used to create jsp
forms rapidly
 Logic tag libs are used to do evaluation of
expressions and decision making
 Bean tag libs are used to manipulate java
beans, cookies, and http headers
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The first struts Application
 Application shows a small form with a
message
 Enter Name <textbox>
 <submit> button
 On submitting, it should show a screen
with hardcoded details of username.

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