How to integrate your Struts application with Spring

How to integrate your Struts application with Spring

To integrate your Struts application with Spring, we have two options:

1.      Configure Spring to manage your Actions as beans, using the ContextLoaderPlugin, and set their dependencies in a Spring context file.

2.      Subclass Spring's ActionSupport classes and grab your Spring-managed beans explicitly using a getWebApplicationContext()method.

Procedure to integrate struts and spring according to case 1

1.      get and include the “struts2-spring-plugin-xxx.jar”

2.      Configure the Spring listener “org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener” in web.xml file.

               <listener>

                        <listener-class>

                                       org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener

                         </listener-class>

            </listener>

3.      Register all the Spring’s Beans in the applicationContext.xml file; the Spring listener will locate this xml file automatically.

               <bean id="userBo" class="com.mkyong.user.bo.impl.UserBoImpl" />

            <bean id="userSpringAction" class="com.mkyong.user.action.UserSpringAction">

                        <property name="userBo" ref="userBo" />            

            </bean>

4.      Declared all the relationship in struts.xml

               <action name="userSpringAction"  class="userSpringAction" >

                        <result name="success">pages/user.jsp</result>

            </action>

  This will pass the Spring’s “userBo” bean into the UserAction via setUserBo() automatically.

            UserBo userBo; 

            public void setUserBo(UserBo userBo) {

                        this.userBo = userBo;

Alternatively, you can use the Spring’s generic WebApplicationContextUtils class to get the Spring’s bean directly.

WebApplicationContext context =

                                     WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext(

                                    ServletActionContext.getServletContext()

                        );

                        UserBo userBo1 = (UserBo)context.getBean("userBo");

                        userBo1.printUser ();