Fun and Games with Struts

I had a requirement for a project at work to insert some preprocessing into our Struts actions that will check to see if something fancy has to happen to decorate the page differently based on a branded association. I thought to myself, "hmm, that will be easy".  I was mostly right.  I have been working mostly with Struts 2 lately, which provides us with a handy dandy prepare() method to override, that is always called before the execute() method in a Struts 2 class that extends ActionSupport.  This is simple:

public class AwesomeActionSupport implements Preparable
{ 
  private Integer integerToSet;    
  private Boolean someBool;

  public void prepare() throws Exception    
  {          
    if( someBool )           
    {                
      integerToSet = new Integer( 1 );          
    }           
    else           
    {
      integerToSet = 1;          
    }   
  }

  public String execute()   
  {         
    System.out.println( integerToSet );

    return SUCCESS;   
  }

  //GETTERS/SETTERS FOR PRIVATE VARS ABOVE

}

As you can see it's quite simple when using Struts 2.  Sadly, most of the functionality in our application is still running Struts 1 for now.  This makes something easy much less simple.  There isn't really a built-in mechanism to make a pre-execution call.  Here's what I came up with:

public abstract class AwesomeAction extends Action
{
  public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form,                               
                               HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) 
    throws Exception   
  {    
    //do prep work    
    request.setAttribute( "whatever the action needs", theValue );    
    return perform( mapping, form, request, response );      
  }

  /**   
    * A stub for performing the execute method, to be implemented by each    
    * individual struts action, after the execute pre-processing is performed   
    *    
    * @param mapping   
    * @param form   
    * @param request   
    * @param response   
    * @return   
    * @throws Exception   
    */  
  public abstract ActionForward perform( ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form,                                         
                                         HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) 
    throws Exception;
}

So now when you write your actual action class, instead of extending the Action class, you extend this action class that does the preprocessing, then delegates the real work to the perform method that you have to define.  Seems to work great, with the only caveat being you can't use a Dispatch action with multiple methods.  If you really want to do that, then upgrade your action/application to Struts 2!