First of all I apologize for the delay in my response, I was caught up in some work and wasn't available for a few days. You might have already done some research on your end, nevertheless I'll still explain the working
You can initiate the new Object at any point in time but the way it gets populated is what matters to us in Struts Model Driver actions. If you initiate at method level ( your action ) as below
There is no significance of this object as it is just telling the JVM to make a new Role object out of thin air ( and you know the rest of the story as how any new object is formed ).
Now, for the ModelDriven action to work, you need to get the object that is residing on the value stack ! This is important. See snippet below
Ofcourse you can also re-write the above snippet as below also
you can also read about it here in the
docs
I hope I was clear enough. Do post back for any further queries.