Struts 2 and JSON

[Pedro Fracarolli]

Hi guys.

Does Struts 2 have support for sending JSON HTTP responses natively? I mean, I can use the println() method from the HttpServletResponse output stream when it comes to Struts 1.2.x in order to generate a JSON response, but, in my opinion, this is not elegant.

If there's no "native" support, would there be a plugin or something?

Pedro.
[ November 11, 2008: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

[Scotty Boy Sinclair]

Struts 2 has a JSON result type which you can use by adding the correct plugin JAR.

You then just declare a result type as follows

    
 <result type="json">
   <param name="root">data</param>
  </result>

The parameter "root" should point to the getter property of the action object which contains the object to convert to JSON data.

The plugin uses reflection to convert any object to JSON string data.

[David Newton]

In addition to the afore-mentioned JSON result the REST plugin of Struts 2.1 also supports JSON responses, in addition to XML and XHTML, based on the requesting URI.

In other words, if we request

/foo/1.json

we'd get JSON back, if we request

/foo/1.xml

we'd get XML back. We can also set the default response type so we can leave off the extension altogether.

[Pedro Fracarolli]

Very interesting stuff. Thank you guys.