Getting Started
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3. Building View Components | Contributors: - Craig R. McClanahan
- Mike Schachter
- Ted Husted
- Martin Cooper
- Ed Burns
- James DeVries
- David Graham
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3.1 Overview |
This chapter focuses on the task of building the View components
for use with the Struts framework.
Many applications rely on JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology to create the
presentation layer.
The Struts distribution includes a comprehensive JSP tag library that
provides support for building internationalized applications, as well as
for interacting with input forms.
Several other topics related to the View components are briefly discussed.
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3.2 Internationalized Messages |
A few years ago, application developers could count on having to support
only residents of their own country, who are used to only one (or
sometimes two) languages, and one way to represent numeric quantities like
dates, numbers, and monetary values.
However, the explosion of application development based on web
technologies, as well as the deployment of such applications on the
Internet and other broadly accessible networks, have rendered national
boundaries invisible in many cases.
This has translated (if you will pardon the pun) into a need for
applications to support internationalization (often called "i18n"
because 18 is the number of letters in between the "i" and the "n") and
localization.
Struts builds upon the standard classes available on the Java platform to
build internationalized and localized applications.
The key concepts to become familiar with are:
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Locale - The fundamental Java class that supports
internationalization is
Locale .
Each Locale represents a particular choice of country and
language (plus an optional language variant), and also a set of
formatting assumptions for things like numbers and dates.
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ResourceBundle - The
java.util.ResourceBundle
class provides the fundamental tools for supporting messages in
multiple languages.
See the Javadocs for the ResourceBundle class, and the
information on Internationalization in the documentation bundle for your
JDK release, for more information.
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PropertyResourceBundle - One of the standard
implementations of
ResourceBundle allows you to define
resources using the same "name=value" syntax used to initialize
properties files.
This is very convenient for preparing resource bundles with messages
that are used in a web application, because these messages are
generally text oriented.
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MessageFormat - The
java.text.MessageFormat
class allows you to replace portions of a message string (in this
case, one retrieved from a resource bundle) with arguments specified
at run time.
This is useful in cases where you are creating a sentence, but the
words would appear in a different order in different languages.
The placeholder string {0} in the message is replaced by
the first runtime argument, {1} is replaced by the
second argument, and so on.
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MessageResources - The Struts class
org.apache.struts.util.MessageResources lets you treat
a set of resource bundles like a database, and allows you to request
a particular message string for a particular Locale (normally one
associated with the current user) instead of for the default Locale
the server itself is running in.
Please note that the i18n support in a framework like Struts is limited to
the presentation of internationalized text and images to the user.
Support for Locale specific input methods (used with languages
such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) is left up to the client device,
whichis usually a web browser.
For an internationalized application, follow the steps described in
the Internationalization document in the JDK documentation bundle for your
platform to create a properties file containing the messages for each
language.
An example will illustrate this further:
Assume that your source code is created in package
com.mycompany.mypackage , so it is stored in a directory
(relative to your source directory) named
com/mycompany/mypackage .
To create a resource bundle called
com.mycompany.mypackage.MyApplication , you would create the
following files in the com/mycompany/mypackage directory:
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MyApplication.properties - Contains the messages in the default
language for your server.
If your default language is English, you might have an entry like
this:
prompt.hello=Hello
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MyApplication_xx.properties - Contains the same messages in the
language whose ISO language code is "xx" (See the
ResourceBundle Javadoc page for a link to the current list).
For a French version of the message shown above, you would have this
entry:
prompt.hello=Bonjour
You can have resource bundle files for as many languages as you need.
When you configure the controller servlet in the web application
deployment descriptor, one of the things you will need to define in
an initialization parameter is the base name of the resource bundle
for the application.
In the case described above, it would be
com.mycompany.mypackage.MyApplication .
<servlet>
<servlet-name>action</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet
</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>application</param-name>
<param-value>
com.mycompany.mypackage.MyResources
</param-value>
</init-param>
<!-- ... -->
</servlet>
The important thing is for the resource bundle to be found on the
class path for your application.
Another approach is to store the MyResources.properties
file in your application's classes folder.
You can then simply specify "myResources" as the application value.
Just be careful it is not deleted if your build script deletes
classes as part of a "clean" target.
If it does, here is an Ant task to run when compiling your application
that copies the contents of a src/conf
directory to the classes directory:
<!-- Copy any configuration files -->
<copy todir="classes">
<fileset dir="src/conf"/>
</copy>
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3.3 Forms and FormBean Interactions |
Note: While the examples given here use JSP and custom tags,
the ActionForm beans and the other Struts controller components are
View neutral.
Struts can be used with Velocity Templates, XSL, and any other
presentation technology that can be rendered via a Java servlet.
See the Resources page for
links to additional information.
At one time or another, most web developers have built forms using
the standard capabilities of HTML, such as the <input>
tag.
Users have come to expect interactive applications to have certain
behaviors, and one of these expectations relates to error handling -- if
the user makes an error, the application should allow them to fix just
what needs to be changed -- without having to re-enter any of the rest
of the information on the current page or form.
Fulfilling this expectation is tedious and cumbersome when coding with
standard HTML and JSP pages.
For example, an input element for a username field might
look like this (in JSP):
<input type="text" name="username"
value="<%= loginBean.getUsername() >"/>
which is difficult to type correctly, confuses HTML developers who are
not knowledgeable about programming concepts, and can cause problems with
HTML editors.
Instead, Struts provides a comprehensive facility for building forms,
based on the Custom Tag Library facility of JSP 1.1.
The case above would be rendered like this using Struts:
<html:text property="username"/>;
with no need to explicitly refer to the JavaBean from which the initial
value is retrieved. That is handled automatically by the JSP tag, using
facilities provided by the framework.
HTML forms are sometimes used to upload other files.
Most browsers support this through a <input type="file"> element,
that generates a file browse button, but it's up to the developer to
handle the incoming files.
Struts handles these "multipart" forms in a way identical to building
normal forms.
For an example of using Struts to create a simple login form,
see the "
Buiding an ActionForm Howto".
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3.3.1 Indexed & Mapped Properties |
Property references in JSP pages using the Struts framework can reference
Java Bean properties as described in the JavaBeans specification.
Most of these references refer to "scalar" bean properties, referring to
primitive or single Object properties.
However, Struts, along with the Jakarta Commons Beanutils library, allow
you to use property references which refer to individual items in an array,
collection, or map, which are represented by bean methods using
well-defined naming and signature schemes.
Documentation on the Beanutils package can be found at
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/api/index.html.
More information about using indexed and mapped properties in Struts can
be found in the FAQ describing Indexed Properties, Mapped Properties,
and Indexed Tags.
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3.3.2 Input Field Types Supported |
Struts defines HTML tags for all of the following types of input fields,
with hyperlinks to the corresponding reference information.
In every
case, a field tag must be nested within a form tag, so that
the field knows what bean to use for initializing displayed values.
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3.3.3 Other Useful Presentation Tags |
There are several tags useful for creating presentations, consult the
documentation on each specific tag library, along with the Tag Developers
Guides, for more information:
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[logic] iterate repeats its
tag body once for each element of a specified collection (which can be an
Enumeration, a Hashtable, a Vector, or an array of objects).
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[logic] present depending on
which attribute is specified, this tag checks the current request, and
evaluates the nested body content of this tag only if the specified value
is present.
Only one of the attributes may be used in one occurrence of this tag,
unless you use the property attribute, in which case the name attribute
is also required.
The attributes include cookie, header, name, parameter, property, role,
scope, and user.
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[logic] notPresent the
companion tag to present, notPresent provides the same functionality when
the specified attribute is not present.
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[html] link generates a HTML
<a> element as an anchor definition or a hyperlink to the specified
URL, and automatically applies URL encoding to maintain session state in
the absence of cookie support.
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[html] img generates a HTML
<img> element with the ability to dynamically modify the URLs
specified by the "src" and "lowsrc" attributes in the same manner that
<html:link> can.
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[bean] parameter
retrieves the value of the specified request parameter, and defines the
result as a page scope attribute of type String or String[].
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3.3.4 Automatic Form Validation |
In addition to the form and bean interactions described above, Struts
offers an additional facility to validate the input fields it has received.
To utilize this feature, override the following method in your ActionForm
class:
validate(ActionMapping mapping,
HttpServletRequest request);
The validate method is called by the controller servlet after
the bean properties have been populated, but before the corresponding
action class's execute method is invoked.
The validate method has the following options:
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Perform the appropriate validations and find no problems -- Return
either
null or a zero-length ActionErrors instance,
and the controller servlet will proceed to call the
perform method of the appropriate Action class.
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Perform the appropriate validations and find problems -- Return an
ActionErrors instance containing
ActionError 's, which
are classes that contain the error message keys (into the
application's MessageResources bundle) that should be
displayed.
The controller servlet will store this array as a request attribute
suitable for use by the <html:errors> tag, and
will forward control back to the input form (identified by the
input property for this ActionMapping ).
As mentioned earlier, this feature is entirely optional.
The default implementation of the validate method returns
null , and the controller servlet will assume that any
required validation is done by the action class.
One common approach is to perform simple, prima facia validations using
the ActionForm validate method, and then handle the
"business logic" validation from the Action.
The Struts Validator, covered in the next section, may be used to easily
validate ActionForms.
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3.3.5 The Struts Validator |
Configuring the Validator to perform form validation is easy.
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The ActionForm bean must extend ValidatorForm
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The form's JSP must include the
<html:javascript> tag for client
side validation.
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You must define the validation rules in an xml file like this:
<form-validation>
<formset>
<form name="logonForm">
<field property="username" depends="required">
<msg name="required" key="error.username"/>
</field>
</form>
</formset>
</form-validation>
The msg element points to the message resource key to use when generating the error message.
- Lastly, you must enable the ValidatorPlugin in the struts-config.xml file like this:
<plug-in className="org.apache.struts.validator.ValidatorPlugIn">
<set-property
property="pathnames"
value="/WEB-INF/validator-rules.xml,
/WEB-INF/validation.xml"/>
</plug-in>
Note: If your required form property is one of the Java object representations of
primitive types (ie. java.lang.Integer), you must set the ActionServlet's convertNull init.
parameter to true. Failing to do this will result in the required validation not being performed
on that field because it will default to 0.
For more about the Struts Validator, see the
Developers Guide.
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3.4 Other Presentation Techniques |
Although the look and feel of your application can be completely
constructed based on the standard capabilities of JSP and the Struts
custom tag library, you should consider employing other techniques that
will improve component reuse, reduce maintenance efforts, and/or reduce
errors.
Several options are discussed in the following sections.
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3.4.1 Application-Specific Custom Tags |
Beyond using the custom tags provided by the Struts library, it is easy
to create tags that are specific to the application you are building, to
assist in creating the user interface. The MailReader example application included with
Struts illustrates this principle by creating the following tags unique to
the implementation of this application:
- checkLogon - Checks for the existence of a particular session
object, and forwards control to the logon page if it is missing. This is
used to catch cases where a user has bookmarked a page in the middle of
your application and tries to bypass logging on, or if the user's session
has been timed out. (Note that there are better ways to authenticate users; the
checkLogon tag is simply meant to demonstrate writing your own custom tags.)
- linkSubscription - Generates a hyperlink to a details page
for a Subscription, which passes the required primary key values as
request attributes. This is used when listing the subscriptions associated
with a user, and providing links to edit or delete them.
- linkUser - Generates a hyperlink to a details page
for a User, which passes the required primary key values as
request attributes.
The source code for these tags is in the src/example directory,
in package org.apache.struts.example , along with the other Java
classes that are used in this application.
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3.4.2 Page Composition With Includes |
Creating the entire presentation of a page in one JSP file (with custom
tags and beans to access the required dynamic data) is a very common
design approach, and was employed in the example application included
with Struts.
However, many applications require the display of multiple logically
distinct portions of your application together on a single page.
For example, a portal application might have some or all of the following
functional capabilities available on the portal's "home" page:
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Access to a search engine for this portal.
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One or more "news feed" displays, with the topics of interest
customizedfrom the user's registration profile.
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Access to discussion topics related to this portal.
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A "mail waiting" indicator if your portal provides free email
accounts.
The development of the various segments of this site is easier if you
can divide up the work, and assign different developers to the different
segments.
Then, you can use the include capability of JavaServer Pages
technology to combine the results into a single result page, or use the
include tag provided with Struts.
There are three types of include available, depending on when you w
ant the combination of output to occur:
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An
<%@ include file="xxxxx" %> directive can
include a file that contains Java code or JSP tags.
The code in the included file can even reference variables declared
earlier in the outer jsp page.
The code is inlined into the other JavaServer Page before it is
compiled so it can definitely contain more than just HTML.
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The include action (
<jsp:include page="xxxxx"
flush="true" /> ) is processed at request time, and is
handled transparently by the server.
Among other things, that means you can conditionally perform the
include by nesting it within a tag like
equals by using it's
parameter attribute.
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The bean:include
tag takes either a an argument "forward" representing a logical name
mapped to the jsp to include, or the "id" argument, which represents a
page context String variable to print out to the jsp page.
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3.4.3 Page Composition With Tiles |
Tiles is a powerful templating library that allows you to construct views
by combining various "tiles".
Here's a quick setup guide:
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Create a /layout/layout.jsp file that contains your app's common look and
feel:
<html>
<body>
<tiles:insert attribute="body"/>
</body>
</html>
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Create your /index.jsp homepage file:
<h1>This is my homepage!</h1>
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Create a /WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml file that looks like this:
<tiles-definitions>
<definition
name="layout"
path="/layout/layout.jsp">
<put name="body" value=""/>
</definition>
<definition name="homepage" extends="layout">
<put
name="body"
value="/index.jsp"/>
</definition>
<tiles-definitions>
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Setup the TilesPlugin in the struts-config.xml file:
<plug-in
className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin">
<set-property
property="definitions-config"
value="/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml"/>
</plug-in>
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Setup an action mapping in struts-config.xml to point to your
homepage tile:
<action
path="/index"
type="org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction"
parameter="homepage"/>
The TilesPlugin configures a special RequestProcessor that determines
if the requested view is a tile and processes it accordingly.
Note that we made the homepage tile extend our root layout tile and
changed the body attribute.
Tiles inserts the file named in the body attribute into the main
layout.
See the tiles-documentation webapp for in-depth examples.
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3.4.4 Image Rendering Components |
Some applications require dynamically generated images, like the
price charts on a stock reporting site.
Two different approaches are commonly used to meet these
requirements:
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Render a hyperlink with a URL that executes a servlet request.
The servlet will use a graphics library to render the graphical image,
set the content type appropriately (such as to
image/gif ), and send back the bytes of that image to the
browser, which will display them just as if it had received a static
file.
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Render the HTML code necessary to download a Java applet that
creates the required graph.
You can configure the graph by setting appropriate initialization
parameters for the applet in the rendered code, or you can have the
applet make its own connection to the server to receive
these parameters.
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3.4.5 Rendering Text |
Some applications require dynamically generated text or markup,
such as XML.
If a complete page is being rendered, and can be output using a
PrintWriter, this is very easy to do from an Action:
response.setContentType("text/plain"); // or text/xml
PrintWriter writer = response.getWriter();
// use writer to render text
return(null);
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3.4.6 The Struts-EL Tag Library |
The Struts-EL tag library is a contributed library in
the Struts distribution.
It represents an integration of the Struts tag library with the JavaServer
Pages Standard Tag Library, or at least the "expression evaluation"
engine that is used by the JSTL.
The base Struts tag library contains tags which rely on the evaluation
of "rtexprvalue"s (runtime scriptlet expressions) to evaluate dynamic
attribute values. For instance, to print a message from a properties
file based on a resource key, you would use the
bean:write tag, perhaps like this:
<bean:message key='<%= stringvar %>'/>
This assumes that stringvar exists as a JSP scripting
variable. If you're using the Struts-EL library, the
reference looks very similar, but slightly different, like this:
<bean-el:message key="${stringvar}"/>
If you want to know how to properly use the Struts-EL
tag library, there are two important things you need to know:
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The Struts tag library
-
The JavaServer Pages Standard tag library
Once you understand how to use these two, consider Struts tag
attribute values being evaluated the same way the JSTL tag attribute
values are.
Past that, there is very little else you need to know to effectively use
the Struts-EL tag library.
Although the Struts-EL tag library is a direct "port"
of the tags from the Struts tag library, not all of the tags in the
Struts tag library were implemented in the Struts-EL
tag library.
This was the case if it was clear that the functionality of a particular
Struts tag could be entirely fulfilled by a tag in the JSTL.
It is assumed that developers will want to use the
Struts-EL tag library along with the JSTL, so it is
reasonable to assume that they will use tags from the JSTL if they
fill their needs.
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