Jakarta Struts Cookbook

9.5. Reporting Errors and Messages from an Action

Problem

You want to display error messages to the user when things go wrong and success messages when things go right.

Solution

For Struts 1.1, use ActionErrors for reporting errors and ActionMessages for informational messages. For Struts 1.2, use ActionMessages for informational messages and errors.

Discussion

Struts gives you a least four classes and three custom tags for creating, storing, and displaying errors and messages. In Struts 1.1, the ActionErrors class is used to hold a collection of errors, represented by ActionError instances. Each ActionError consists of a key to be looked up from the default MessageResources bundle and an optional set of Objects (up to four) to be used as parameters for message substitution. The Action class in Example 9-9 shows typical usage of ActionErrors.

Example 9-9. Creating ActionErrors from an Action

package com.oreilly.strutsckbk.ch09; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils; import org.apache.struts.Globals; import org.apache.struts.action.Action; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionError; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionErrors; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionForward; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionMapping; public class RegistrationAction extends Action { public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest ...