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Jakarta Struts Cookbook
book

Jakarta Struts Cookbook

by Bill Siggelkow
February 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
528 pages
12h 53m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Jakarta Struts Cookbook

11.4. Restricting Actions by Role

Problem

You want to allow a user to access an action if that user has a specific role.

Solution

Use the roles attribute of the action element to specify the roles that are permitted to use the action:

<!-- Display all users -->
<action    path="/ViewUsers"
        forward="/view_users.jsp"
          roles="manager,sysadmin"
/>

Discussion

Struts actions, configured via the action element in the struts-config.xml file, can be restricted to certain roles using the roles attribute. This attribute accepts a comma-separated list of role names. When a request is received for the action, the RequestProcessor.processRoles( ) method checks that the user has at least one of the roles specified. If the user doesn't have one of the roles, the HTTP 403 error (Forbidden) is sent; otherwise, processing continues normally. Here is the processRoles( ) method from the Struts RequestProcessor:

protected boolean processRoles( HttpServletRequest request,
                                HttpServletResponse response,
                                ActionMapping mapping )
        throws IOException, ServletException {

    // Is this action protected by role requirements?
    String roles[] = mapping.getRoleNames( );
    if ((roles == null) || (roles.length < 1)) {
        return (true);
    }

    // Check the current user against the list of required roles
    for (int i = 0; i < roles.length; i++) {
        if ( request.isUserInRole(roles[i]) ) { if (log.isDebugEnabled( )) { log.debug(" User '" + request.getRemoteUser( ) + "' has role '" + roles[i] + "', granting access"); } return (true); } } // The current ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600771XSupplemental ContentErrata Page