RESTful URLs are experimental. Feeback appreciated!

RestfulActionMapper

A custom action mapper using the following format:

http://HOST/ACTION_NAME/PARAM_NAME1/PARAM_VALUE1/PARAM_NAME2/PARAM_VALUE2

You can have as many parameters you'd like to use. Alternatively the URL can be shortened to the following:

http://HOST/ACTION_NAME/PARAM_VALUE1/PARAM_NAME2/PARAM_VALUE2

This is the same as:

http://HOST/ACTION_NAME/ACTION_NAME + "Id"/PARAM_VALUE1/PARAM_NAME2/PARAM_VALUE2

Suppose for example we would like to display some articles by id at using the following URL sheme:

http://HOST/article/Id

Your action just needs a setArticleId() method, and requests such as /article/1, /article/2, etc will all map to that URL pattern.

Restful2ActionMapper

Improved restful action mapper that adds several ReST-style improvements to action mapping, but supports fully-customized URL's via XML. The two primary ReST enhancements are:

• If the method is not specified (via '!' or 'method:' prefix), the method is "guessed" at using ReST-style conventions that examine the URL and the HTTP method.
• Parameters are extracted from the action name, if parameter name/value pairs are specified using PARAM_NAME/PARAM_VALUE syntax.

These two improvements allow a GET request for 'category/action/movie/Thrillers' to be mapped to the action name 'movie' with an id of 'Thrillers' with an extra parameter named 'category' with a value of 'action'. A single action mapping can then handle all CRUD operations using wildcards, e.g.

  <action name="movie/*" className="app.MovieAction">
    <param name="id">{0}</param>
    ...
  </action>

This mapper supports the following parameters:

• struts.mapper.idParameterName - If set, this value will be the name of the parameter under which the id is stored. The id will then be removed from the action name. This allows restful actions to not require wildcards.

The following URL's will invoke its methods:

• GET: /movie/ => method="index"
• GET: /movie/Thrillers => method="view", id="Thrillers"
• GET: /movie/Thrillers!edit => method="edit", id="Thrillers"
• GET: /movie/new => method="editNew"
• POST: /movie/ => method="create"
• PUT: /movie/Thrillers => method="update", id="Thrillers"
• DELETE: /movie/Thrillers => method="remove", id="Thrillers"

To simulate the HTTP methods PUT and DELETE, since they aren't supported by HTML, the HTTP parameter "__http_method" will be used.

The syntax and design for this feature was inspired by the ReST support in Ruby on Rails. See http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2006/08/01/whats-new-in-edge-rails-simply-restful-support-and-how-to-use-it