CreateActions

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About this Tutorial

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

Here's a quick-n-dirty how to. We're creating a new Action/JSP for the "Position" entity in this example:

• Generate your Struts' ActionForms by executing "ant ejbdoclet" from the command-line
• Generate a skeleton JSP using the strutsgen tool in the tools folder:
  • From the command-line, navigate to "tools/strutsgen"
  • Execute "ant gen -Dform.name=PositionForm" to generate two files in tools/strutsgen/build: PositionForm.properties (labels for your form elements) and PositionForm.jsp (skeleton JSP file)
  • Copy the contents of PositionForm.properties into web/WEB-INF/classes/ApplicationResources.properties.
  • Copy PositionForm.jsp to web/positionForm.jsp
• Create a new Struts Action in src/web. We called it PositionAction.java. Look in ResumeAction.java for the XDoclet javadocs at the beginning of the class. Use these as an example to create a /savePosition action-mapping.
• Delete all methods in PositionAction.java (if you used ResumeAction.java as a template). Find and replace [Rr]esume with [Pp]osition.
• Override the execute method and put a debugging statement into the method body to verify we're hitting it. Something like: System.out.println("entering execute method");
• Edit web/positionForm.jsp so the form's action="savePosition"
• Run "ant deploy" to deploy the updated application to Tomcat.
• Start Tomcat and go to http://localhost:8080/apptracker/positionForm.jsp.
• This should bring up the JSP, with a simple form in it. Click the Save button and you should see "entering execute method" in your Tomcat console. If so - nice work!

Next up - integrating positionForm.jsp with Tiles, putting some meat into the Action's execute method, creating an ActionTest, replacing execute with different CRUD methods (add, edit, search), customizing the JSP so it looks good and finally - write a WebTest to test the JSPs functionality (or doing it via the browser).

personForm-final.png

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