I have an action that populates the result from the DB. Right now, I see a way of doing it and that is to make the Action ServletRequestAware, set the populated list as a request attribute and show it in jsp.
Since a lot of improvements have been introduced into struts2, is there any other way of doing that? The first thing that comes to my mind is to use displayTag and change the return type of Action to a List, but that does not seem to work.
Thanks for any replies in advance.
You question is unclear, you should read some book about Struts2 to get the general idea.
No need to make the Action ServletRequestAware. The mapping from http parameters to actions fields is automatically done via the Param interceptor (already set in the default configuration). And one of the points of Struts2 is decoupling the action from the http protocol, you should not (typically) do anything related to http in your action.
Tipically, in your action execute() method (or whatever) you'll get the data to display from the DB and set it as one property of your action, so that is accesable from some getter.
Then, in your view page (JSP or whatever) you'll display it. You can use displayTag, but first you'll prefer to display it "manually", to understand what's involved. See for example here http://www.roseindia.net/struts/struts2/struts2controltags/iterator-tag.shtml
For manually displaying a table, also see this example http://www.vaannila.com/struts-2/struts-2-example/struts-2-crud-example-1.html , search for the <table class="userTable> tag.