Monday December 06, 2004

Servlet container forward from inside Velocity I ported some JSP UI code to Velocity, it's been fun learning the Velocity paradigm (being able to cleanly process template components outside the container rocks). One of the things in the JSP UI handled forwarding requests that bypassed the struts controller back through struts.

In JSP with struts tags, it looks like this (assume web.xml has "struts-logic" mapped):

<%@ taglib uri="struts-logic" prefix="logic" %>
<logic:redirect forward="home"/>

But what about Velocity? Well, it turns out that the VelocityViewServlet stuffs the basic servlet container things into the Velocity context, much like JSTL does in JSPville. Ergo, the $request object itself can be invoked like this:

$request.getRequestDispatcher("/home.do").forward($request,$response)

Seems kinda grotty to not be able to use struts symbolic name, but so far that's where my read of the Velocity docs has taken me. As I unpeel the onion, I may be inspired to subclass the VelocityViewServlet as a StrutsViewServlet... it seems like however you're invoking the rendering, you should be able to access, if present, other runtime services such as struts, spring, etc. ( Dec 06 2004, 10:05:35 AM PST ) Permalink