Introduction to MVC and the Jakarta Struts Framework

By Gyanendra Dwivedi Software Consultant

What is MVC
The Model View Controller design pattern is a technique used to separate Business logic/state (the Model) from User Interface (the View) and program progression/flow (the Control). This pattern is very useful when it comes to modern web development:
The majority of modern, high usage websites are dynamically driven. People well skilled at presentation (HTML writers) seldom know how to develop back-end solutions and visa versa. Separating business rules from presentation is good no matter what environment you develop in be it web or desktop.

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Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

What is MVC (cont

The View

The view is how data is represented to the user. For instance the view in a web application may be an HTML page, an image or other media

The Model
The model represents the data in the system. For instance, a model might represent the properties associated with a user s profile

The Controller
The controller is the glue between the model and the view. It is responsible for controlling the flow of the program as well as processing updates from the model to the view and visa versa

Feb 11, 2003

Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

What is MVC (cont

User

View

Controller

Model

Feb 11, 2003

Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

What is MVC (cont

User

View

Controller

Model
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Benefits of MVC
Promotes Modularity Multiple views Abstraction Allows application to be defined in a flow-chart, use-case or activity diagram which is more easily transferred to implementation.

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Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

Designing an MVC App.

Let s try designing an application from scratch The application will be a message board where users can view messages and post messages The application will require that a user has an account setup with the message board before posting a message, but an account is not required for viewing a message. The basic components we must implement for this message board are:
User profile Logon/authentication Message List Message

Feb 11, 2003

Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

Activity Diagrams
I find the UML activity diagrams to be the most useful construct for describing program flow. Activity diagrams are much like flow charts, except a few new constructs are added such as describing concurrency as well as recursive elements. Each node of the Activity Diagram can be thought of as a call to a Controller asking it to take you to the next step in the application

Feb 11, 2003

Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

Activity Diagram: Create Profile

Create Profile

Edit Profile
[invalid]

==

Create Profile()

[else]

Save Profile

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Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi

Activity Diagram: Logon

Login Form Create Profile()

[new user]

==
[else]

Logon()

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Activity Diagram: View Msg.

Show Msg. Board

Select Msg.

==

Select Msg()

Display Msg.

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Activity Diagram: Edit Msg.

Select Msg() Logon()
[else]

[expired session]

Create New Msg. Edit Msg.

[else]

Save Msg.
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Jakarta Struts
In order to take advantage of the MVC design pattern in your applications a considerable framework must be in place. Today we are going to learn about such a framework named Struts Struts is an open source MVC framework developed by the Apache Jakarta project group. Struts allows JSP/Servlet writers the ability to fashion their web applications using the MVC design pattern. By designing your web application using Struts you allow:
Architect the ability to design using the MVC pattern Developer to exploit the Struts framework when building the app. Web designer to be sheltered from learning how to program http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/
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Struts (cont

Struts takes the grunt work out of developing an MVC based web app. The Struts framework provides a plethora of canned objects which can facilitate fundamental aspects of MVC, while allowing you to extend further as need suites Struts allows you to configure a lot of the default framework objects through xml configuration files. Our examples will use the Struts framework using the Apache Tomcat Servlet/JSP container. http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/ Tomcat 3.2.1 provides a reference implementation of the Servlet specification 2.2 and JSP specification 1.1
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Struts (cont
The components of MVC in Struts:

The View is usually defined as a JSP or HTML page. The Model is usually defined as a Java object (sometimes called a bean). The Controller is defined by a Java object which extends the org.apache.struts.action.Action class. The Action class is at the heart of the Struts framework.

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Struts: The Model

To define a model in Struts is simple. Just create a java class and provide some functions. Your model classes should be coded independent of the Struts framework to promote maximum code reuse by other applications (i.e. if you have to reference javax.servlet.* class in your model, you are doing something wrong) Struts provides some default Model components, the most important of which is ActionForm. If you create a Model class by extending the Struts ActionForm class, Struts will
Ensure your form bean is created when needed Ensure form submittal directly updates your form object with the inputted values Your controller object will be passed the form bean
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The Model (cont

Struts will only handle models in an automatic fashion if you extend org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm Most likely you will have already built model object such as Customer, Employee, etc Because you don t want to tie your existing model objects to the Struts framework by having to extend ActionForm, Struts provides a org.apache.struts.util.PropertyUtils class that has a static method called copyProperties When your controller receives a form, it can simply call PropertyUtils.copyProperties(myModel, form) to copy all form properties to your original model object.

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Model: ActionForm
import import import import import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm; org.apache.struts.action.ActionMapping; org.apache.struts.upload.FormFile;

public class LogonForm extends ActionForm { protected String userName; protected String password; public void setUserName(String userName) { this.userName = userName; } public void setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; } //There would also be getters for these properties }
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Model: Action Form (cont

When this LogonForm is associated with a controller, it will be passed to the controller whenever it s service is requested by the user. JSP pages acting as the view for this LogonForm are automatically updated by Struts with the current values of the UserName and Password properties. If the user changes the properties via the JSP page, the LogonForm will automatically be updated by Struts But what if the user screws up and enters invalid data? ActionForms provide validation Before an ActionForm object is passed to a controller for processing, a validate method can be implemented on the form which allows the form to belay processing until the user fixes invalid input as we will see on the next slide...
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Model: ActionForm Validation

public ActionErrors validate(ActionMapping mapping, HttpServletRequest request) { if (.equals(this.userName)) { ActionErrors aes = new ActionErrors(); aes.add(new ActionError(error.username.invalid)); return aes; } }

Typically what will happen is Struts will see that errors are being returned and will forward the user to a jsp page that has been setup as the failure page. Usually, the errors result from bad input on a form, so the failure page will be set to the original form and any <html:errors> tags which are found are replaced with the contents of the ActionErrors returned from the validate method.
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The Controller
The controller is the switch board of MVC. It directs the user to the appropriate views by providing the view with the correct model The task of directing users to appropriate views is called mapping in struts. Luckily, the Struts framework provides a base object called org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet. The ActionServlet class uses a configuration file called strutsconfig.xml to read mapping data called action mappings The ActionServlet class reads the incoming URI and tries to match the URI against a set of action mappings to see if it can find a controller class which would be willing to handle the request This process is described in a diagram on the following page
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Controller (cont
http://myhost/authorize.do

Server configured to pass *.do extensions to org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet via a web.xml configuration file

ActionServlet object inspects the URI and tries to match it against an ActionMapping located in the struts-config.xml file.

Instance of appropriate Action class is found and it s perform() method is called

Action object handles the request and returns control to a view based where the user is within the flow of the application Feb 11, 2003 Introduction to Jakarta Struts Gyanendra Dwivedi 22

Controller: Sample
public class LogonAction extends Action { public ActionForward perform(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {

LogonForm myForm = (LogonForm) form; if (myForm.getUserName().equals(john) && myForm.getPassword().equals(doe)) { //return a forward to our success page return mapping.findForward(success); } else { ActionErrors errors = new ActionErrors(); errors.add("password", new ActionError("error.password.required")); this.saveErrors(errors); //Action implements this method //go back to the page that made the request return (new ActionForward(mapping.getInput())); }

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}

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Controller: Forwards
You might be wondering what means?
mapping.findForward(success)

The mapping object passed to the Controller s perform() method is of type ActionMapping. When you setup your struts-config.xml file you can define forward tags that are available via the ActionMapping.findForward() method. In the previous example, our ActionMapping object would have been loaded with values from the <action-mapping> section defined for the LogonAction controller in struts-config.xml.

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Controller: ActionMapping
<action-mappings> <action path="/logon" type="org.apache.struts.example.LogonAction" name="logonForm" scope="request" input="/logon.jsp"> </action> <forward name="success path="/msgBoard.jsp"/> </action-mappings>

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The View
The view in Struts is represented by JSP pages JSP pages allows developers to write java code, and access server side java objects in a web page Although this is good, we will distract ourselves from the reason we are using Struts and MVC. We want to let our web page authors create dynamic web pages without knowing how to program JSP solves this by introducing the concept of Tag Libraries Taglibs allow web designers the convenience of using HTML like tags It lets developers program the logic behind the tags The attributes of the tags are used as basic parameters that the developers will interpret, which could change the output generated by the tag

* Struts contains a series of taglibs designed to allow developers and web page authors the ability to communication one another to facilitate dynamic web content
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The View: Example

<%@ page language="java" %> <%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-bean.tld" prefix="bean" %> <%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-html.tld" prefix="html" %> <html:html locale="true"> <head> <title><bean:message key="logon.title"/></title> <html:base/> </head> <body bgcolor="white"> <html:errors/> <html:form action="/logon.do" focus="username"> <table border="0" width="100%"> <tr> <th align="right"> <bean:message key="prompt.username"/> </th> <td align="left"> <html:text property="username" size="16" maxlength="16"/> </td> </tr> <tr> <th align="right"> <bean:message key="prompt.password"/> </th> <td align="left"> <html:password property="password" size="16" maxlength="16"/> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right"> <html:submit property="submit" value="Submit"/> </td> <td align="left"> <html:reset/> </td> </tr> </table> </html:form> </body> </html:html>

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View: Internationalization
Commonly referred to as i18n (I <followed by 18 letters> n) The ability to maintain a web app in several different languages Based on the language setup on the client side, the web app will auto-magic-ally This is achieve in Struts through Java Resource Bundles ResourceBundles are classes that support, among other things, String data. Instead of having to make a ResourceBundle class for each language supported by your web app, resource bundles can be described as text files If you had a set of strings in the French language you might make a file named MyStrings_fr.properties

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View: i18n (cont

When the resource bundle class loader tries to load MyStrings_fr, it will look for a MyStrings_fr.properties file and create the class based on the properties in the file Part of the Struts framework states that when setting up the ActionServlet in the web.xml file, if you add an initialization parameter named application this should contain the class name of your resource file:
<servlet> <servlet-name>action</servlet-name> <servlet-class> org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet </servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>application</param-name> <param-value>myPackage.MyResources</param-value> </init-param> </servlet>

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View: i18n (cont

In the previous example, when the ActionServlet is loaded it will read it s application parameter to figure out that it should load string resources from mypackage.MyResources
If it doesn t find a class by that name, it tries to find a MyResources.properties file It then figures out what language the client is using. If it is different from the default, it looks up the 2 character ISO language code and tries to look for a class or .properties file by appending the ISO code to the class:
If the client is French it would look up:
1) mypackage.MyResources_fr.class If it can t find this class it then looks for: 2) mypackage.MyResources_fr.properties

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View i18n (cont

MyResources.properties file:
helloworld.title=Hello World! menu.file=File menu.file.open=Open menu.file.close=Close menu.file.exit=Exit menu.edit=Edit menu.edit.copy=Copy menu.edit.paste=Paste

MyResources_fr.properties file:
helloworld.title=All monde! menu.file=Dossier menu.file.open=Ouvrir menu.file.close=Fermer menu.file.exit=Sortie menu.edit=Rdiger menu.edit.copy=Copier menu.edit.paste=Pte

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View i18n (cont

In order for web developers to get at the string resources we use a special Struts tag called <bean:message/> e.g. <bean:message key= helloworld.title"/>
This tag will be replaced with text from the appropriate resource bundle associated with this web app (via the application init param for the ActionServlet in web.xml) for the key logon.title

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Resources
Struts homepage
http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/

Sun s Servlet Specification

http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/download.html#specs

Sun s JSP Specification

http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/download.html

Blue Stone s Struts Tutorial

http://developer.bluestone.com/scripts/SaISAPI.dll/Gallery.class/de mos/trailMaps/index.jsp

My email address for questions:

craiger@tataryn.net

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