In general
Struts 2 abstracts the request away; the framework populates action properties from request parameters. Assuming the form:
the action would just define a "name" property--no need to access the request:
You can access request parameters through a map by implementing ParameterAware if really necessary, but it's usually not.
You
can access the HttpServletRequest itself by either implementing ServletRequestAware or using the ServletActionContext static utils. It's relatively rare to need to do either of these, and for obvious reasons it's not recommended.