Struts:Calling a Action Class from another Action class

Created Sep 3, 2002

James Page

You can easily forward between actions by specifiying the action as another forward in the struts configuration file:

<action path="/actions/firstAction" 
        type="example.SecurityAction" 
        scope="request">
  <forward name="success" 
           path="/actions/secondAction.do"/>
  <forward name="failure" 
           path="/pages/login.jsp"/>
</action>

<action path="/actions/secondAction" 
        type="example.BusinessAction" 
        scope="request">
  <forward name="success" page="/pages/businessPage.jsp"/>
</action>

Alternatively, you can create an ActionForward object on the fly so that you could redirect the user to a protected URL request that has been stored in the session prior to going throught security.

This can be combined quite neatly with the standard security mechanism provided with Servlet/JSP applications - does depend a bit on which application server/web server vendor you are using! I think that the standard identifier in the request is 'j_target_url' - you could use the value of this session attribute to create an ActionForward in your SecurityAction class and forward the user to the original URL they requested - note that you will also have to authenticate the user with the web container as well!

Cheers

James