Dinesh on Java

Categories: Struts2

Struts 2 BeanTag Example

In this section, we are going to describe the Bean Tag. The Bean tag is a generic tag that is used to instantiates a class that confirms to the JavaBeans specification. This tag has a body which can contain a number of Param elements to set any mutator methods on that class.

In this tutorials, you will use the “bean” tag to instantiate a class named “UserBean“, set its property via “param” element and print out the value.

Simple Bean
A simple class, later use bean tag to instantiate it.

UserBean.java

package com.dineshonjava.struts2.bean;

/**
 * @author Dinesh Rajput
 *
 */
public class UserBean {
 private String userName;
 private String userAge;
 private String userPhone;
 private String userAddress;
 public String getUserName() {
  return userName;
 }
 public void setUserName(String userName) {
  this.userName = userName;
 }
 public String getUserAge() {
  return userAge;
 }
 public void setUserAge(String userAge) {
  this.userAge = userAge;
 }
 public String getUserPhone() {
  return userPhone;
 }
 public void setUserPhone(String userPhone) {
  this.userPhone = userPhone;
 }
 public String getUserAddress() {
  return userAddress;
 }
 public void setUserAddress(String userAddress) {
  this.userAddress = userAddress;
 }
 
}

Action
An Action class to forward the request.

DataTagAction.java

package com.dineshonjava.struts2.action;

import com.dineshonjava.struts2.bean.UserBean;
import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport;

/**
 * @author Dinesh Rajput
 *
 */
public class DataTagAction extends ActionSupport {

 private static final long serialVersionUID = -7744420104547018874L;
 private UserBean bean;
 public String execute() {
  return SUCCESS;
 }
 public UserBean getBean() {
  return bean;
 }
 public void setBean(UserBean bean) {
  this.bean = bean;
 }
 
}

Bean tag example
A JSP page to show the use of “bean” tag to instantiate the “UserBean“.

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags"%>
<html>
<head>
<title>Bean Data Tag Struts2 | dineshonjava.com</title>
</head>
<body>
   <h2>An example of the Bean tag: </h2>
   <s:bean name="com.dineshonjava.struts2.bean.UserBean" var="paramTag">
  <s:param name="userName">Dinesh Rajput</s:param>
  <s:param name="userAge">27</s:param>
  <s:param name="userPhone">9998851234</s:param>
  <s:param name="userAddress">ABC Noida</s:param>
 </s:bean>
 
 <ol>
  <li>User Name : <s:property value="#paramTag.userName" /></li>
  <li>User Age : <s:property value="#paramTag.userAge" /></li>
  <li>User Phone : <s:property value="#paramTag.userPhone" /></li>
  <li>User Address : <s:property value="#paramTag.userAddress" /></li>
 </ol>
</body>
</html>

Configuration Files for struts2:
struts.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
    "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN"
    "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd">
 
<struts>
    <constant name="struts.enable.DynamicMethodInvocation" value="false" />
    <constant name="struts.devMode" value="false" />
    <constant name="struts.custom.i18n.resources" value="myapp" />
 
 <package name="default" extends="struts-default" namespace="/">
        <action name="beantag" class="com.dineshonjava.struts2.action.DataTagAction">
            <result name="success">/success.jsp</result>
        </action>
    </package>
 </struts>

create web.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd" id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0">
  <display-name>Struts2DataTag</display-name>
 <filter>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <filter-class>
            org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher
        </filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Right click on the project name and click Export > WAR File to create a War file. Then deploy this WAR in the Tomcat’s webapps directory. Finally, start Tomcat server and try to access

URL http://localhost:8080/doj/beantag.

This will give you following screen:

Download Source Code
BeanDataTagExample.zip

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Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!