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Part III: Creating Actions and JSPs - A HowTo for creating Struts Actions and JSPs in the AppFuse architecture.
This tutorial depends on Part II: Creating new Managers.

About this Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to create an Action, a JUnit Test (using StrutsTestCase), and a JSP for the form. The Action we create will talk to the PersonManager we created in the Creating Managers tutorial. This tutorial will simplify everything - we will not actually be rendering any data or making the UI look pretty. The next tutorial will show you how to integrate your new JSP into your webapp.
I will tell you how I do stuff in the Real World in text like this.

Let's get started by creating a new Action and JSP in AppFuse's architecture.

Table of Contents

  • [1] Create a skeleton JSP using XDoclet
  • [2] Create a new ActionTest to test our Action
  • [3] Create a new Action
  • [4] Display the JSP in a browser and run the ActionTest

Create a skeleton JSP using XDoclet [#1]

In this step, we'll generate a skeleton or our JSP for displaying information from the PersonForm. I say skeleton because it'll just be the <form> itself. It will contain table rows and Struts' <html:text> tags for each property in PersonForm.java. The tool that we use to do this was written by Erik Hatcher. It's basically just a single class (FormTagsHandler.java) and a couple of XDoclet templates (FormKeys.xdt and StrutsForm_jsp.xdt). All these files are located in tools/strutsgen.

Here are the simple steps to generating the JSP and a properties file containing the labels for the form elements:

  • Execute ant ejbdoclet - this generates the PersonForm.java from the Person.java POJO.
  • From the command-line, navigate to "tools/strutsgen"
  • Execute ant -Dform.name=PersonForm to generate two files in tools/strutsgen/build:
    • PersonForm.properties (labels for your form elements)
    • personForm.jsp (skeleton JSP file)
  • Copy the contents of PersonForm.properties into web/WEB-INF/classes/ApplicationResources.properties. You can remove the keys for personForm.saved and personForm.unsaved - these are properties from the BaseObject that we don't used in our Forms. If you do this, make sure and remove the rows (<tr>'s) containing these properties in personForm.jsp. Here is an example of what you might add to ApplicationResources.properties: 
# -- person form --
personForm.firstName=First Name
personForm.id=Id
personForm.lastName=Last Name
  • Copy personForm.jsp to web/personForm.jsp

We copy the JSP to the web folder instead of web/pages because the pages directory ends up in WEB-INF/pages when the application is packaged into a WAR file. This is a recommended practice when building secure web applications.

The container provides security for all files below WEB-INF. This applies to client requests, but not to forwards from the ActionServlet. Placing all JSPs below WEB-INF ensures they are only accessed through Actions, and not directly by the client or each other. This allows security to be moved up into the Controller, where it can be handled more efficiently, and out of the base presentation layer.

The web application security for AppFuse specifies that all *.do url-patterns should be protected. This guarantees 1) all Actions are protected, and 2) you must go through an Action to get to a JSP (or at least the ones in pages).

All this is to say that putting the personForm.jsp in the web folder will allow us to view it without making a Tile for it. We'll get to that in the next tutorial.

At this point, you won't be able to view this JSP in your browser because the <html:form> tag in personForm.jsp has action="" which is not allowed. You can try it yourself by setting up AppFuse on Tomcat using ant setup-db setup-tomcat deploy.

Then, start Tomcat and then go to http://localhost:8080/appfuse/personForm.jsp. This will result in the following error: 

 javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: Cannot retrieve mapping for action /
Therefore, we need to create an Action for this JSP, and we should probably create a Test before we write our Action.

Create a new ActionTest to test our Action [#2]

To create a StrutsTestCase Test for our Action, start by creating a PersonActionTest.java file in the test/web/**/action directory.
As usual, copy → save as an existing ActionTest (i.e. UserActionTest). Replace [Uu]ser with [P]erson. You might want to make sure Cactus (StrutsTestCase is an extension of Cactus] tests are running before you copy an existing one. Run ant test-cactus -Dtestcase=UserAction to verify the UserAction works. Stop Tomcat before you do this.

If you did copy UserActionTest, make sure and change UserFormEx to PersonForm. The reason for UserFormEx is to extend the UserForm and put custom web-only properties or methods into our form. Since the UserForm is generated, it's not very feasibly to do it in the User.java object.

When we do create an Action (in [step 3]), we're only going to create an execute method, rather than all the different CRUD methods. So let's just test that method to start.


package org.appfuse.webapp.action;

public class PersonActionTest extends BaseStrutsTestCase {
    //~ Constructors ===========================================================

    public PersonActionTest(String name) {
        super(name);
    }

    //~ Methods ================================================================

    public void testExecute() throws Exception {
        setRequestPathInfo("/editPerson");
        addRequestParameter("id", "1");
        actionPerform();

        verifyNoActionErrors();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        junit.textui.TestRunner.run(PersonActionTest.class);
    }
}

Everything should compile at this point (ant compile-web) since we're not referring to the PersonAction directly in our test. However, if you try to run ant test-cactus -Dtestcase=PersonAction, it won't work (make sure Tomcat is not running if you decide to try this).

Create a new Action [#3]

Now we have to create an Action (a.k.a. the Controller) to talk to our Manager and retrieve/save our data. In src/web/**/action, create a PersonAction.java file with the following contents:


package org.appfuse.webapp.action;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;
import org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm;
import org.apache.struts.action.ActionForward;
import org.apache.struts.action.ActionMapping;


/**
 * Implementation of <strong>Action</strong> that interacts with the {@link
 * PersonForm} and retrieves values.  It interacts with the {@link
 * PersonManager} to retrieve/persist values to the database.
 *
 * @struts.action name="personForm" path="/editPerson" scope="request"
 *  validate="false" parameter="action" input="mainMenu"
 */
public final class PersonAction extends BaseAction {
    //~ Instance fields ========================================================

    private Log log = LogFactory.getLog(PersonAction.class);

    //~ Methods ================================================================

    public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form,
                                 HttpServletRequest request,
                                 HttpServletResponse response)
    throws Exception {
        if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
            log.debug("Entering 'execute' method");
        }

        // return nothing (yet)
        return null;
    }
}

We're not putting much in PersonAction at this point because we just want to 1) render the JSP and 2) verify our Test runs. The XDoclet tags (beginning with @struts.action) will generate the following XML in the build/appfuse/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml file (when you run ant webdoclet):


<action path="/editPerson" type="org.appfuse.webapp.action.PersonAction"
    name="personForm" scope="request"  input="mainMenu"
    parameter="action" unknown="false" validate="false">
</action>

I formatted the XML above the the purposes of the tutorial. No content has changed.

Now we need to change the "action" attribute in the <personForm.jsp> to be action="editPerson".


<html:form action="editPerson" method="post" styleId="personForm"
  focus="" onsubmit="return validatePersonForm(this)">

Everything is almost done for this tutorial, let's get to running our tests!

Display the JSP in a browser and run the ActionTest [#4]

To test the JSP visually in your browser, save everything, run ant deploy, start Tomcat, and navigate to http://localhost:8080/appfuse/personForm.jsp. You should see something similar to the following image in your browser:

There is also a deploy-web target in build.xml that will allow you to just deploy the files in the web directory. Nothing gets compiled or generated when you use this target.

Now, if you stop Tomcat and run ant test-cactus -Dtestcase=PersonAction, that should work too!

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 51 seconds
Look in your console's log for PersonAction.execute(33) | Entering 'execute' method. This is the log.debug statement we put in our execute method. You should also be able to view personForm.jsp (make sure Tomcat is running and you've logged into AppFuse) and click the "Save" button to see the same debug message.

Next Up: Part IV: Configuring Tiles and Action CRUD methods - Integrating personForm.jsp with Tiles, replacing execute with different CRUD methods (add, edit, delete), customizing the JSP so it looks good and finally - writing a WebTest to test the JSPs functionality.


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This particular version was published on 06-Nov-2006 13:52:29 MST by MattRaible.