Integrating Jmesa with Struts 1

After a long gap ,I am back .
Background:
Few months back , I used Jmesa with Struts 1 in my project .
Never heard the name Jmesa before .My requirement was bit complex and was searching for a custom API .Had a look at different java tags like DisplayTag etc , but was not happy .
Finally I found Jmesa !
It was more than enough for me then :)

The Jmesa site had no documentation on  Struts1 and Jmesa integration ,so had to do it on my own and frankly speaking ... it took some effort .
But ,after the job was done , I was really impressed with this wonderful API .
It is simple,lucid,easy to use .

I was bit surprised that why Jmesa is not that popular as it should be ? May be lack of documentation ? I do not know . It is actually very well documented .
I wanted to give back something to the Jmesa community ,so ...decided to write a step by step guide doc about Struts1 and Jmesa integration and finally send it to Jmesa owner Jeff Johnston .
Jeff was very glad with it and published it in the Jmesa website itself. Here is the link Integrating Jmesa with Struts1


I have send a war file also that contains end to end integration of Struts and Jmesa .Go to the download location Jmesa related downloads and download the war file named 'Struts1WithAjaxExample.war'.

I see the download count increasing everyday and feel really happy .My purpose is met .
Hope this helps you .If you see the download count ....at least it has helped more than 1100 developers across the globe by now :)

Generic solution to prepare the application URL from server end.

Problem description :
I was quite annoyed few days back when I got stuck for sometime while doing a very small task .
The requirement was to display an URL on a JSP page and the situation was such that, the URL value should be a DTO property value (may be populated by an Struts action class or whatever ) .
Say your application URL is "http://xyz.com:9080/PayrollApp".Now you want to display an URL which is like "http://xyz.com:9080/PayrollApp/edit.do".How to create such URL String ( without any sort of hard coding ) from an action class ? Well apparently it is quite simple , in fact it is , specially after you read this post , but trust me otherwise it is not.

The first thing that comes to our mind is "request.getContextPath()" will serve the purpose . Yes off course , but wait a minute ....it will do your job only partially . You will only get the application name (in this case the "PayrollApp" portion ) using request.getContextPath().


What about the previous parts ? The schema,host name ,port number ? How you will populate their value ? Confused ? Honestly speaking , I was .

Lets discuss about URLs in general . Generally what are the different parts of an URL ?
1.The first part is the protocol (here it is http).
2.The protocol is followed by ://
3.Next comes the host (in our example it is "xyz.com" )
4.You may have a port number also after the host name (9080 ) .
5. After the domain you may have your application name (as we have PayrollApp) .But always that is not the case.


Analysis and solution:
Well , the following code is self explanatory .Just use it ...

Sample Code:

String applicationPath = request.getScheme()+"://"+request.getServerName()+":"+
request.getServerPort()+request.getContextPath();

String finalURI=applicationPath+"/edit.do"

Notes :
Please note I have kept the "request.getServerPort()" , but that is not always the case .