Introduction

In the execute method of many Struts 2 ActionSupport classes are statements that create objects and then have those objects execute methods that perform needed tasks. Whenever one class creates an object of another class that introduces a dependency between the two classes. The Spring framework makes it easier for the application developer to manage these dependencies and helps make the application more flexible and maintainable. This tutorial will show you how to use Struts 2 and Spring together to manage the dependencies between your ActionSupport classes and other classes in your application.

If you examine the example application for the Struts 2 Themes tutorial you'll see this code in the EditAction ActionSupport class

The above statement hard-codes a dependency between the EditAction class and the EditServiceInMemory class. This is poor design for two reasons.

1. If I need to replace the EditServiceInMemory with another class that implements the EditService interface I'll have to hunt down and replace all statements where I hard-coded the dependency.
2. I cannot test EditAction without using the EditServiceInMemory class. I cannot isolate EditAction by using a stub implementation of EditService when writing my test case because the use of EditServiceInMemory is hard-coded.

Spring provides a mechanism to manage dependencies by injecting them at run time. Struts 2 ActionSupport classes—like any other Java class—can be injected with a dependent object by the Spring framework. So instead of having the above code, I would have this statement in EditAction.

At run time the Spring framework will provide an object of a class that implements the EditService interface.

Struts 2 Spring Plugin

Struts 2 provides a plugin that enables Spring to inject into the ActionSupport classes any dependent objects you've specified in the Spring configuration file. Consult Spring Plugin documentation for more information about how the plugin works.

For a Maven application you'll need to add a dependency to the struts2-spring-plugin jar (see the Maven example application for this tutorial). The plugin's pom.xml includes transitive dependencies to the Spring jar files.

In your ActionSupport class you must have a set method for the dependent object that follows standard Java bean naming conventions. If you examine the EditAction class for this tutorial's application you'll see this set method.

Spring will use that set method to provide an object of type EditService to the EditAction class at run time.

To make our application "Spring aware" we need to add this line to web.xml.

The above code will activate the Spring framework when the application is started up by the Servlet container. By default Spring will look for a configuration file name applicationContext.xml in WEB-INF (consult the Spring documentation for how you can change where Spring looks and what the configuration file name is).

Spring Configuration File

In the Spring configuration file we create a bean node for those objects we want Spring to create an instance of and inject into our ActionSupport class. In the example application is this applicationContext.xml.

Note the id value above. By default the Spring plugin works with Spring to autowire the dependencies of the ActionClass by "name." Spring will create an object of class EditServiceMemory and provide that object to any ActionSupport class that has a setEditService method with an argument of type EditService. Consult the Spring Plugin documentation for how to change the default autowire method.

Alternative - Have Spring Manage Creation Of ActionSupport Class

Using the above methodology, the Struts 2 framework will still manage the creation of the ActionSupport class. If you prefer you can configure the application so that Spring will create the ActionSupport class also. To support this technique you need to add a bean node to the Spring configuration file for the ActionSupport class.

Note in the above that there is an editAction bean and its editService property is set to the editService bean. Since we are having Spring manage the EditAction class we must specify any properties of EditAction that we want Spring to inject.

In the struts.xml configuration file you must specify the Spring id value for the class attribute of the action node. This tells Struts to get a bean with that id value from Spring for the Action class.

Summary

In this tutorial we reviewed how to use the Struts 2 Spring plugin to integrate Spring and Struts. By using the Struts 2 Spring plugin you can have Spring manage the dependencies of your ActionSupport classes. Of course you can also take advantage of the many other benefits (AOP, Spring JDBC) that the Spring framework provides.