Putting it all together - iBATIS in Action - page 307

14.3.1 BeanBase

It's important to understand the purpose of the BaseBean before we look into the
ActionContext and the BeanAction . The BaseBean extends ValidatorActionForm
to allow for standard Struts validation to occur. Instead of extending an Action-
Form directly, you extend the BaseBean . The BaseBean contains your normal prop-
erties, as an ActionForm normally would. Thus, it is populated as Struts would
populate the ActionForm because it is an ActionForm . The only difference is that
your extended BaseBean would also contain behavior methods that follow the sim-
plified signature of public String methodName() .

14.3.2 BeanAction

The next piece of this puzzle that we should introduce is the BeanAction . The
BeanAction has a couple of responsibilities. First, the BeanAction populates the
ActionContext . Next, it routes behavior calls to your extended BaseBean and trans-
lates the returned behavior method's String into an ActionForward for Struts. This
is how the BaseBean is able to stay clear of Struts-specific components in the
behavior signatures. The BeanAction class looks in two different places to deter-
mine which behavior method to call on the extended BaseBean . First, it checks to
see if the action mapping has a specified parameter that explicitly states the
method to call. If the parameter specifies * , then a method is not called and the
success action forward is used. If the action mapping parameter attribute is not
specified or is empty, then the ActionBean looks at the path and uses the filename
minus the extension for the method call. So, if you used a standard .do mapping
and had a path that ended with /myMethod.do , the myMethod behavior method
would be called on your extended BaseBean .

14.3.3 ActionContext

Finally, the ActionContext is used to abstract from specific web semantics. It pro-
vides you access to the request, parameters, cookies, session, and application all
through a Map interface. This gives you the option of reducing direct dependen-
cies on the web layer. Most of the ActionContext successfully isolates you from
Struts and even the Servlet API . However, the ActionContext still provides direct
access to the HttpServletRequest and the HttpServletResponse for those times
when you need access to it.
There are several advantages to this approach. First of all, we don't need to spend
time and code casting ActionForm objects to their extended types. This is avoided
because the Action is the ActionForm . All you need to do is access the properties
directly on the bean object that extends BaseBean . Second, the behavior methods