OGNL Basics

• Struts-specific language features
  • Accessing static properties
  • Struts 2 Named Objects

Struts-specific language features

The biggest addition that Struts provides on top of OGNL is the support for the ValueStack. While OGNL operates under the assumption there is only one “root”, Struts’s ValueStack concept requires there be many “roots”.

For example, suppose we are using standard OGNL (not using Struts) and there are two objects in the OgnlContext map: “foo” -> foo and “bar” -> bar and that the foo object is also configured to be the single root object. The following code illustrates how OGNL deals with these three situations:

#foo.blah // returns foo.getBlah()
#bar.blah // returns bar.getBlah()
blah      // returns foo.getBlah() because foo is the root

What this means is that OGNL allows many objects in the context, but unless the object you are trying to access is the root, it must be prepended with a namespaces such as @bar. Now let’s talk about how Struts is a little different…

In Struts, the entire ValueStack is the root object in the context. Rather than having your expressions get the object you want from the stack and then get properties from that (ie: peek().blah), Struts has a special OGNL PropertyAccessor that will automatically look at the all entries in the stack (from the top down) until it finds an object with the property you are looking for.

For example, suppose the stack contains two objects: Animal and Person. Both objects have a name property, Animal has a species property, and Person has a salary property. Animal is on the top of the stack, and Person is below it. The follow code fragments help you get an idea of what is going on here:

species    // call to animal.getSpecies()
salary     // call to person.getSalary()
name       // call to animal.getName() because animal is on the top

In the last example, there was a tie and so the animal’s name was returned. Usually this is the desired effect, but sometimes you want the property of a lower-level object. To do this, XWork has added support for indexes on the ValueStack. All you have to do is:

[0].name   // call to animal.getName()
[1].name   // call to person.getName()

With expression like [0] ... [3] etc. Struts will cut the stack and still return back a CompoundRoot object. To get the top of that particular stack cut, use [0].top

Accessing static properties

OGNL supports accessing static properties as well as static methods.

By default, Struts 2 is configured to disallow this - to enable OGNL’s static member support you must set the struts.ognl.allowStaticMethodAccess constant to true via any of the Constant Configuration methods.

OGNL’s static access looks like this:

@some.package.ClassName@FOO_PROPERTY
@some.package.ClassName@someMethod()

Struts 2 Named Objects

Struts 2 places request parameters and request, session, and application attributes on the OGNL stack. They may be accessed as shown below.