Jakarta Struts Cookbook

6.5. Forwarding Requests

Problem

You want to provide an action that forwards a request to any action, JSP page, servlet, or other resource of your web application.

Solution

Use a forwarding action. Specifying the module-relative path to the resource as the value of the forward attribute is the most convenient way:

<action  path="/ForwardTest"
    forward="/forward_test.jsp"/>

Alternatively, if you use a custom RequestProcessor, which overrides the processForwardConfig( ) method, you must use the Struts built-in ForwardAction, specifying the context-relative path for the value of the parameter attribute.

<action  path="/ForwardActionTest"
         type="org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction"
    parameter="/forward_test.jsp"/>

Discussion

Struts provides two mechanisms for creating an action that forwards directly to a specified resource. You can use the forward attribute or the ForwardAction. In most situations, the forward attribute will work just fine. The value of the attribute is treated as a module-relative path. At request time, the RequestProcessor checks the action mapping specifies a forward attribute. If so, it converts the forward attribute value to a context-relative path by adding the module prefix to the front of the path. The request processor then hands the request and response to the RequestDispatcher.forward( ) method and immediately returns.

The ForwardAction is a Struts prebuilt action class included with the Struts distribution. This Action forwards the request to the path specified as ...