why do we typecast ActionForm into our plain java bean class in Action class?

[p hasini]

why do we typecast ActionForm into our plain java bean class in Action class? What is the reason.

[Ankit Garg]

Take a look at the API doc of ActionForm class.
Now I typical subclass of ActionForm that we create would look something like this

public LogicForm extends ActionForm {
    private String username;
    private String password;
    public String getUsername() {
        return username;
    }
    public void setUsername(String uname) {
        username = uname;
    }

    public String getPassword() {
        return password;
    }
    public void setPassword(String pwd) {
        password = pwd;
    }
}

Now in your action class, if you don't cast ActionForm to LogicForm, then you won't be able to call getUsername or getPassword methods. So basically you can access only the methods of ActionForm class. So then what's the use of ActionForm if you can't access the properties that you created in the bean associated with your Action?? You won't be able to leverage the automatic request parameter transferring capability of Struts as you'll have to access request parameters from the HttpServletRequest object...