Spring Injecting into Struts RequestProcessor

Question

I wrote a custom Struts RequsetProcessor for my application that is manually fetching some references from Spring. It is working just fine, but I would like to do the "right" thing and inject everything I need at construction time.

Is there a way to define a custom Struts RequestProcessor in a way that I can inject Spring objects into it when Struts instantiates this RequestProcessor?

Answer 1

The short answer is "NO". The long answer is "kind of":

Assuming Struts is integrated with Spring in your application via ContextLoaderPlugin, you can do one of two things:

A) Create a "ProcessorContext" bean (or whatever you want to call it) that you would define in your Spring context and access from your custom request processor by obtaining it from Spring's context (which you can get via WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(getServletContext())).

B) If your custom processor extends Spring's DelegatingRequestProcessor or DelegatingTilesRequestProcessor you can instead write a new request processor that would do what you want functionality-wise, bind it to Spring context with all your dependencies and then extend DelegatingRequestProcessor or DelegatingTilesRequestProcessor to get it from context (either via type or id) and delegate to it. This is essentially an extension of (A) but it delegates all Spring's plumbing to Spring's request processor extension leaving your custom processor Spring-independent.

Spring / Struts integration is described in detail here.