<action-bean> vs MultiAction

[ccanning]

Is there a big difference between using action-bean versus extending MultiAction? Are there trade-offs? Are there places where one can't be used instead of the other?

[newbix]

Hi ccaning,


I usually use MultiAction, FormAction or Action classes of Spring Web Flow if I want to manipulate something in the web application context.

Example, if I want to have a reference of HttpServletRequest, I could easily do this,

public Event SampleEvent( RequestContext context )
{
        HttpServletRequest request = ( (ServletExternalContext) context.getExternalContext() ).getRequest();

...
   return success();
}

or if I want to have a reference to the formObject of FormAction so that I could put values to it if ever I'm editing an object I would do this...

    public Event setupReferenceData( RequestContext context ) throws Exception
    {
        MutableAttributeMap flashScope = context.getFlashScope();

        User user = (User) flashScope.get( "toBeEditedUser" );

        UserBean formObject = (UserBean) getFormObject( context );

        formObject.setUserId( user.getUserId() );
        formObject.setAccess( user.getAccess() );
        formObject.setEnabled( user.isEnabled() );
        formObject.setPassword( user.getPassword() );
        formObject.setUsername( user.getUsername() );

        return success();
    }

Basically <action bean> is used for pojo classes that are responsible for the business logic of the application.

[Lyserg]

Hello,

with an bean-action you don't have any dependency on SWF APIs (or any apis in generall), you can call any POJO method.
The trade-off there is, that you don't have access to the RequestContext, so you can't put more then one object into a particular scope with one bean call.

rgds
agim

[ccanning]

Thanks. I think I understand it now.