Top Most Java Struts Interview Questions
1. What is Struts?
The core of the Struts framework is a flexible control layer based on standard technologies like Java Servlets, JavaBeans, ResourceBundles, and XML, as well as various Jakarta Commons packages. Struts encourages application architectures based on the Model 2 approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm.
Struts provides its own Controller component and integrates with other technologies to provide the Model and the View. For the Model, Struts can interact with standard data access technologies, like JDBC and EJB, as well as most any third-party packages, like Hibernate, iBATIS, or Object Relational Bridge. For the View, Struts works well with JavaServer Pages, including JSTL and JSF, as well as Velocity Templates, XSLT, and other presentation systems.
The Struts framework provides the invisible underpinnings every professional web application needs to survive. Struts helps you create an extensible development environment for your application, based on published standards and proven design patterns.
2. What is MVC?
Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a design pattern put together to help control change. MVC decouples interface from business logic and data.
? Model : The model contains the core of the application’s functionality. The model encapsulates the state of the application. Sometimes the only functionality it contains is state. It knows nothing about the view or controller.
? View: The view provides the presentation of the model. It is the look of the application. The view can access the model getters, but it has no knowledge of the setters. In addition, it knows nothing about the controller. The view should be notified when changes to the model occur.
? Controller:The controller reacts to the user input. It creates and sets the model.
3. What is Jakarta Struts Framework?
Jakarta Struts is open source implementation of MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern for the development of web based applications. Jakarta Struts is robust architecture and can be used for the development of application of any size. Struts framework makes it much easier to design scalable, reliable Web applications with Java.
4. What is ActionServlet?
The class org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet is the called the ActionServlet. In the the Jakarta Struts Framework this class plays the role of controller. All the requests to the server goes through the controller. Controller is responsible for handling all the requests.
5. How you will make available any Message Resources Definitions file to the Struts Framework Environment?
T Message Resources Definitions file are simple .properties files and these files contains the messages that can be used in the struts project. Message Resources Definitions files can be added to the struts-config.xml file through tag.
6. What is Action Class?
The Action Class is part of the Model and is a wrapper around the business logic. The purpose of Action Class is to translate the HttpServletRequest to the business logic. To use the Action, we need to Subclass and overwrite the execute() method.
In the Action Class all the database/business processing are done. It is advisable to perform all the database related stuffs in the Action Class. The ActionServlet (commad) passes the parameterized class to Action Form using the execute() method.
The return type of the execute method is ActionForward which is used by the Struts Framework to forward the request to the file as per the value of the returned ActionForward object.
7. What is ActionForm?
An ActionForm is a JavaBean that extends org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm. ActionForm maintains the session state for web application and the ActionForm object is automatically populated on the server side with data entered from a form on the client side.
8. What is Struts Validator Framework?
Struts Framework provides the functionality to validate the form data. It can be use to validate the data on the users browser as well as on the server side. Struts Framework emits the java scripts and it can be used validate the form data on the client browser. Server side validation of form can be accomplished by sub classing your From Bean with DynaValidatorForm class.
The Validator framework was developed by David Winterfeldt as third-party add-on to Struts. Now the Validator framework is a part of Jakarta Commons project and it can be used with or without Struts. The Validator framework comes integrated with the Struts Framework and can be used without doing any extra settings.
9. Give the Details of XML files used in Validator Framework?
The Validator Framework uses two XML configuration files validator-rules.xml and validation.xml. The validator-rules.xml defines the standard validation routines, these are reusable and used in validation.xml. to define the form specific validations. The validation.xml defines the validations applied to a form bean.
10. How you will display validation fail errors on jsp page?
Following tag displays all the errors:
11. How you will enable front-end validation based on the xml in validation.xml?
The tag to allow front-end validation based on the xml in validation.xml. For example the code: generates the client side java script for the form \”logonForm\” as defined in the validation.xml file. The when added in the jsp file generates the client site validation script.
12. How to get data from the velocity page in a action class?
We can get the values in the action classes by using data.getParameter(\”variable name defined in the velocity page\”);
13. What is a framework?
A framework is made up of the set of classes which allow us to use a library in a best possible way for a specific requirement.
14. What is Struts framework?
Struts framework is an open-source framework for developing the web applications in Java EE, based on MVC-2 architecture. It uses and extends the Java Servlet API. Struts is robust architecture and can be used for the development of application of any size. Struts framework makes it much easier to design scalable, reliable Web applications with Java.
15. What are the components of Struts?
Struts components can be categorize into Model, View and Controller:
? Model: Components like business logic /business processes and data are the part of model.
? View: HTML, JSP are the view components.
? Controller: Action Servlet of Struts is part of Controller components which works as front controller to handle all the requests.
16. What are the core classes of the Struts Framework?
Struts is a set of cooperating classes, servlets, and JSP tags that make up a reusable MVC 2 design.
? JavaBeans components for managing application state and behavior.
? Event-driven development (via listeners as in traditional GUI development).
? Pages that represent MVC-style views; pages reference view roots via the JSF component tree.
17. What is role of ActionServlet?
ActionServlet performs the role of Controller:
? Process user requests
? Determine what the user is trying to achieve according to the request
? Pull data from the model (if necessary) to be given to the appropriate view,
? Select the proper view to respond to the user
? Delegates most of this grunt work to Action classes
? Is responsible for initialization and clean-up of resources
18. What is the ActionForm?
ActionForm is javabean which represents the form inputs containing the request parameters from the View referencing the Action bean.
19. What are the important methods of ActionForm?
The important methods of ActionForm are : validate() & reset().
20. Describe validate() and reset() methods?
validate() : Used to validate properties after they have been populated; Called before FormBean is handed to Action. Returns a collection of ActionError as ActionErrors. Following is the method signature for the validate() method.
reset(): reset() method is called by Struts Framework with each request that uses the defined ActionForm. The purpose of this method is to reset all of the ActionForm’s data members prior to the new request values being set.
21. What is ActionMapping?
Action mapping contains all the deployment information for a particular Action bean. This class is to determine where the results of the Action will be sent once its processing is complete.
22. How is the Action Mapping specified?
We can specify the action mapping in the configuration file called struts-config.xml. Struts framework creates ActionMapping object from configuration element of struts-config.xml file
23. What is role of Action Class?
An Action Class performs a role of an adapter between the contents of an incoming HTTP request and the corresponding business logic that should be executed to process this request.
24. In which method of Action class the business logic is executed?
In the execute() method of Action class the business logic is executed.
public ActionForward execute(
ActionMapping mapping,
ActionForm form,
HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws Exception ;
execute() method of Action class:
? Perform the processing required to deal with this request
? Update the server-side objects (Scope variables) that will be used to create the next page of the user interface
? Return an appropriate ActionForward object
25. What design patterns are used in Struts?
Struts is based on model 2 MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. Struts controller uses the command design pattern and the action classes use the adapter design pattern. The process() method of the RequestProcessor uses the template method design pattern. Struts also implement the following J2EE design patterns.
? Service to Worker
? Dispatcher View
? Composite View (Struts Tiles)
? Front Controller
? View Helper
? Synchronizer Token
26. Can we have more than one struts-config.xml file for a single Struts application?
Yes, we can have more than one struts-config.xml for a single Struts application. They can be configured as follows:
action
org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet
config /WEB-INF/struts-config.xml,
/WEB-INF/struts-admin.xml,
/WEB-INF/struts-config-forms.xml
…..
27. What is the difference between session scope and request scope when saving formbean?
when the scope is request,the values of formbean would be available for the current request.
when the scope is session,the values of formbean would be available throughout the session.
28. What are the different kinds of actions in Struts?
The different kinds of actions in Struts are:
? ForwardAction
? IncludeAction
? DispatchAction
? LookupDispatchAction
? SwitchAction
29. What is DispatchAction?
The DispatchAction class is used to group related actions into one class. Using this class, you can have a method for each logical action compared than a single execute method. The DispatchAction dispatches to one of the logical actions represented by the methods.
It picks a method to invoke based on an incoming request parameter. The value of the incoming parameter is the name of the method that the DispatchAction will invoke.
30. How to use DispatchAction?
To use the DispatchAction, follow these steps :
? Create a class that extends DispatchAction (instead of Action)
? In a new class, add a method for every function you need to perform on the service – The method has the same signature as the execute() method of an Action class.
? Do not override execute() method – Because DispatchAction class itself provides execute() method.
? Add an entry to struts-config.xml
31. What is the use of ForwardAction?
The ForwardAction class is useful when you’re trying to integrate Struts into an existing application that uses Servlets to perform business logic functions. You can use this class to take advantage of the Struts controller and its functionality, without having to rewrite the existing Servlets.
Use ForwardAction to forward a request to another resource in your application, such as a Servlet that already does business logic processing or even another JSP page. By using this predefined action, you don’t have to write your own Action class. You just have to set up the struts-config file properly to use ForwardAction.
32. What is IncludeAction?
The IncludeAction class is useful when you want to integrate Struts into an application that uses Servlets. Use the IncludeAction class to include another resource in the response to the request being processed.
33. What is the difference between ForwardAction and IncludeAction?
The difference is that you need to use the IncludeAction only if the action is going to be included by another action or jsp. Use ForwardAction to forward a request to another resource in your application, such as a Servlet that already does business logic processing or even another JSP page.
34. What is LookupDispatchAction?
The LookupDispatchAction is a subclass of DispatchAction. It does a reverse lookup on the resource bundle to get the key and then gets the method whose name is associated with the key into the Resource Bundle.
35. What is the use of LookupDispatchAction?
LookupDispatchAction is useful if the method name in the Action is not driven by its name in the front end, but by the Locale independent key into the resource bundle. Since the key is always the same, the LookupDispatchAction shields your application from the side effects of I18N.
36. What is difference between LookupDispatchAction and DispatchAction?
The difference between LookupDispatchAction and DispatchAction is that the actual method that gets called in LookupDispatchAction is based on a lookup of a key value instead of specifying the method name directly.
37. What is SwitchAction?
The SwitchAction class provides a means to switch from a resource in one module to another resource in a different module. SwitchAction is useful only if you have multiple modules in your Struts application. The SwitchAction class can be used as is, without extending.
38. What is DynaActionForm?
A specialized subclass of ActionForm that allows the creation of form beans with dynamic sets of properties (configured in configuration file), without requiring the developer to create a Java class for each type of form bean.
39. How to display validation errors on jsp page?
tag displays all the errors. iterates over ActionErrors request attribute.
40. What are the various Struts tag libraries?
The various Struts tag libraries are:
? HTML Tags
? Bean Tags
? Logic Tags
? Template Tags
? Nested Tags
? Tiles Tags