Creating navigation links in Struts 2

Question

Is there some way to replicate rails' "link-to-unless-current"?

Ie. if i have a list of links in my navigation, and I want to mark the current page with a different css style (or even have it be plain text, not a link)?

Now I just made a method in my action-class (getPage()) which returns a name that I assign for each action, and test for that when building my navigation... Works but not pretty, and I have to manually set the page name (couldn't struts somehow automaticalyy get it from the context).

Using Struts 2, Tiles, JSP + Struts taglibs.

Answer 1

To get the current url you you can use the Url tag without any params, actions, etc:

<s:url var="currenturl" includeParams="get" escapeAmp="false"/>

Then assuming you construct your navigation Url something like:

<s:url var="url" action="someAction" escapeAmp="false">
    <s:param name="id" value="id"/>
</s:url>

Then you can then use a normal if tag to test whether the current url matches on that you've constructed.

<s:if test="#url eq #currenturl">
</s:if>

For example, to change the class, you can do a conditional inline to your anchor definition:

<a href="<s:property value="#url"/>" <s:if test="#url eq #currenturl">class="current"</s:if>>XXX</a>

Use the includeParams="get" if the parameters in your URL are meaningful for navigation otherwise exclude that and use an if like:

<s:if test="#url.startsWith(#currenturl)">