How to access beans from OGNL

[E Robb]

Im having problems accessing beans from OGNL. It always returns null in the view page. The setters & getters in the actions seem to be working fine when I do a System.out.print. Ill bet Ive tried 100 different ways to access the bean but it always fails. Can anyone shed any lite on this?


Struts.xml:

	<package name="candidateProfile" extends="tiles-default" namespace="/candidate"> 
	
		<!--***set name space for tiles and run the action class
		  		foldername.javafilename sets variables for OGNL. not much to do here.
		  		This will be used quite a bit in the xml below
		-->
		<action name="index" class="candidate.Index"> 
		     <result type="tiles" name="success">/candidate/candidate.tiles</result> 
		     <result type="redirect" name="failure">/login/index.jsp</result> 
		</action>       
	</package>

Action:

package candidate;

import actionsupport.GlobalActionSupport;
import com.bis.webservices.handlers.EntityHandler;
import com.bis.webservices.handlers.CodeHandler;
import helperclasses.LoginV1;
import helperclasses.Sessions;
import java.util.HashMap;

public class Index extends GlobalActionSupport{
	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
	
	/*
	 * See candidateBean for all candidate setters / getters in the candidate folder.
	 */

	private long authUser=0;
	private Sessions sess = new Sessions();
	public CandidateBean cand = new CandidateBean();
	private String LOGIN_ID;
	
	
	//profile display
	public String execute(){
		
		/*
		 * this is not security just a test of being sure access and redirect are correct.
		 * More research needs to be put into security.
		 */
		//login helper
		LOGIN_ID = (String)sess.getSessionValue("LOGIN_ID");
		if(LOGIN_ID == null){
			return "failure";
		}
		
		EntityHandler entityHandler = new EntityHandler();
		CodeHandler codeHandler = new CodeHandler();
		HashMap entityData = new HashMap();
		
		//get the login
		LoginV1 v1Login = new LoginV1();
		authUser = v1Login.loginV1Session(getText("ADAPT_DOMAIN"));
		if(authUser==0){
			return "failure";
		}
		
		try {
			
			//get the entity
			entityData = entityHandler.getEntityAsHashMap(authUser, LOGIN_ID);

			cand.setCand_FirstName( entityHandler.getEntityValue(entityData, getText("CAND_FIRSTNAME")) );
			
			System.out.print("FirstName = "+cand.getCand_FirstName()); //works fine
			
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
			v1Login.logoutV1Session(authUser);
			return "failure";
		}
		System.out.print("FirstName Outside Try Catch = "+cand.getCand_FirstName()); //works fine
		
		v1Login.logoutV1Session(authUser);
		return "success";
	}
	
}

Bean Class:

package candidate;

import java.io.Serializable;

import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport;

/*
 * contains all the getters and setters for candidate access
 */
public class CandidateBean extends ActionSupport implements Serializable {
	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
	
	public String cand_firstname;
	

    
	//profile
	public void setCand_FirstName(String CAND_FIRSTNAME) {
		this.cand_firstname = CAND_FIRSTNAME;
	}	
	public String getCand_FirstName() {   
		return cand_firstname;
	}
}

The View:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>   
<%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %>

<!-- ***Comment in s:debug to create a link that when clicked shows everything in the OGNL 
		value stack very handy when you need to know what's on the stack.
-->
<s:debug/>

<!-- s:bean name="candidate.CandidateBean" var ="c" / --> 
<s:set value="@candidate.CandidateBean" var="var"/> 


<table width="96%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2">
  <tr>
    <td width="30%" class="tdLabelDisplay" >
    	<s:text name="LBL_PERSON_FIRSTNAME"/>:</td>
   		<td width="70%"><s:property value="#var.cand_firstname"/></td>
  </tr>
</table>

[E Robb]

Just a quick clarification on what I am trying to accomplish here. I have a site that will have 3 parts for people. A person can be a candidate, client or a customer. All three people types will have the exact same setters / getters. So instead of writing setters / getters in all the Actions for all three person sections of the website I want 1 bean that contains all the setters and getters for a person.

Now the Action will create a new instance of the bean, set/get then the view will pull the values the action set. If I put my setters/getters in the Action the OGNL works fine on the view page. But if I try and have a common bean that is initialized from the action OGNL does not seem to want to pull the values set into the view.

thanks