Struts Spring simple example

[Michael Sampson]

I've done some searching and followed examples and I am trying to inject into a struts action a simple string using spring DI and I am unsuccessful.

I've got

org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ng.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter 

defined for all requests for the struts filter
in web.xml

I've got

 
org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener

defined as a listener in web.xml

my struts in action is

springAction extends ActionSupport

has field aString with setter,

setAString(String s)

it is defined is struts.xml on the classpath

		<action name="springAction" class="com.web.springAction">
			<result name="success">resultJSP.jsp</result>
		</action>

and in applicationContext I have the bean wired up:

	<bean id="springAction" class="com.web.springAction">
		<property name="AString" value="a string value"></property>
	</bean>

I would have thought the property name should have been 'aString' but the deployer complained

inside the execute method of the action, aString is null. Nothing was injected. No run time errors at the console. The setter is there. Do I need to access the applicationContext and do a get by id name? I thought the spring container using the context xml would set the string for me when it created the action. I also found something talking about a struts plug-in for configuring spring but I suspect that was for earlier versions of spring and struts and is now deprecated or do I still need that?

Mike

[David Newton]

Please UseCodeTags when posting code or configuration. Unformatted code and configuration is unnecessarily difficult to read. You can edit your post by using the button.

[David Newton]

What made you think you didn't need the Spring plugin to use Spring? Struts 2 needs to know to use Spring as the object factory (and a few other minor things).

[Michael Sampson]

Dave or anyone else for that matter, I've done some more searching and I want to confirm that I've found the right path to go down to resolve this...
Looking at
http://www.javabeat.net/articles/70-integrating-struts-with-spring-1.html
to use the ContextLoaderPlugin
The article talks about doing one of 2 things (I have a choice)

A) Overriding the Struts RequestProcessor with Spring’s DelegatingRequestProcessor.
B) Delegate Struts Action management to the Spring framework.

In the struts.xml file, I declare a plugin and provide as a parameter the location of applicationContext

<plug-in className="org.springframework.web.struts.ContextLoaderPlugIn">
  <set-property property="contextConfigLocation"
      value="/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml” />
</plug-in>

for overriding the struts request processer add

 <controller processorClass="org.springframework.web.struts.DelegatingRequestProcessor"/> 

to struts.xml

or in the second way, I set the type in my struts action

type="org.springframework.web.struts.DelegatingActionProxy" 

which gives the spring container control over creating the object. The action will need to be declared in applicationContext.
Does this sound correct. I thought this would be easier than this. The examples of struts to spring I had seen previously did not include any of this.

Mike

[Michael Sampson]

Ok,
I got around this. I did 2 things to fix this and I don't know which did what. I went and download a spring to struts integration plugin. Then I made sure to identify the class in struts.xml to what the id name for the bean was in applicationContext.

From my research, the ContextLoaderPlugin was for Struts 1 being that it worked with the ActionServlet.

[David Newton]

Whoa, yeah, you were trying to mix Struts 1 and Struts 2 there.

Just to confirm: you're using the Struts 2 Spring integration plugin from the Struts 2 distribution now, right?

[Michael Sampson]

I added the struts2-spring-plugin-2.0.11.2.jar to the classpath.

[David Newton]

Okay. (I'd really recommend upgrading your S2 version, but that's a different issue.)