Struts LookupDispatchAction

I started investingating struts yesterday and found it somewhat frustrating. one of the things I wanted to do was have submit buttons that have the same name, but have the request handler detect which button was pressed.. clearly you can do this using javascript.. but some browsers may have javascript disabled.

The Jakarta Struts project promises this capability using their framework. One of the helper action classes was the LookupDispatchAction, but using it wasn’t as straightforward as I hoped. Essentially I wanted to create a simple forward/back wizard that would submit a post inbetween pages. The LookupDispatchAction class behaves similarly to how HTML radio buttons work, where you have a similar group name, but each property has a different value (e.g. young, old, dead). In my case, my group was called “direction” with submit values of “next”, “back”, and “cancel”

Without going through all the gory details, I’ve provided the source on how to do this. After googling around I couldn’t find any concrete samples, other than code snippets that left me wondering like, “should I still provide the execute(…) method in my LookupDispatchAction subclass because none of my direction methods were being invoked.” I kept getting errors like: “Request[/step1] does not contain handler parameter named ‘direction’. This may be caused by whitespace in the label text”

I also placed an entry in tss, without much luck.

Anyway, here’s the code. It’s the complete web application including the humongous 2Mb struts libs. (I’m using struts 1.24) I have build scripts for both tomcat 4.1x and tomcat 5.5x