Handling hundreds of actions in Struts2

Question

Hi all, I've inherited a struts 1 web application where, in order to reduce the number of Action classes (I guess this is the reason), lots of actions are mapped inside a single Action class, like:

public XXXAction() throws Exception{
     actions = new Hashtable();
     actions.put("/XXX/main/load", new Integer(0));
     actions.put("/XXX/main/save", new Integer(1));
            ......
}

public ActionForward executeAction(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
throws IOException, ServletException
{
try
    {
        switch (((Integer) actions.get(action)).intValue())
        {
         case 0:
          loadXXXMain();
          break;
            case 1:
        .......

and so on (in some Action classes I have almost one hundred of these small actions).

Now I'm looking at migrate to struts2 and I would like to have a cleaner and better solution to handle this, maybe without having a single Action class for each of these small classes. What do you suggest? I don't like this solution, but I don't like having hundreds of Action classes....

Thanks! Roberto

Answer 1

Sounds like you've got a significant refactoring on your hands. I agree that hundreds of fine-grained Actions doesn't sound like a good solution.

Start writing unit tests before you begin. Maybe Selenium can help you here.

Answer 2

You can map a single Action class into several urls each one handled by a different method of the class. Checkout the Struts2 documentation here. I'm generally used to map a single url to a single Action class, but I think you can also group some urls together if they are related to the same domain concept (like CRUD, for example).

Answer 3

Hello

If you have hundreds of actions to map you can use wildcard mapping. For example:

book_ad, book_edit, book_new >>can be translated to>> book_*

You can also reuse actions with the redirectAction or redirectChain results, reducing in this way the number of actions.

If you do not remember those topics here a tutorial:

Actions and Results tutorial