Jakarta Struts Cookbook

2.8. Selectively Disabling Actions

Problem

You want to disable an action using a custom property that can be set on the action element in your struts-config.xml file; forwarding any requests to the disabled action to an "under construction" page.

Solution

Create a custom ActionMapping extension (as shown in Example 2-16) that provides a boolean property indicating if the action is disabled or not.

Example 2-16. Custom ActionMapping

import org.apache.struts.action.ActionMapping;

public class DisablingActionMapping extends ActionMapping {

    private String disabled;
    private boolean actionDisabled = false;
    
    public String getDisabled( ) {
        return disabled;
    }

    public void setDisabled(String disabled) {
        this.disabled = disabled;
        actionDisabled = new Boolean(disabled).booleanValue( );
    }
    
    public boolean isActionDisabled( ) {
        return actionDisabled;
    }
}

This action mapping class can now be specified in the struts-config.xml file. You set the disabled property to true if an action is to be disabled:

<action-mappings type="com.oreilly.strutsckbk.DisablingActionMapping">

  <!-- Edit mail subscription -->
  <action    path="/editSubscription"
             type="org.apache.struts.webapp.example.EditSubscriptionAction"
        attribute="subscriptionForm"
            scope="request"
         validate="false">
    <set-property property="disabled" value="true"/>
    <forward name="failure"              path="/mainMenu.jsp"/>
    <forward name="success"              path="/subscription.jsp"/>
  </action>

Then create a custom RequestProcessor, such as the one shown in Example 2-17, that handles the ...