TechFAQ

ForwardAction is the one of the most frequently used built-in Action classes. Most of the times you will perform some processing when you navigate from one page to another. In Struts, this processing is encapsulated in the Action instances. There are times however when all you want to do is navigate from one page to another without performing any processing.Suppose you want to go from jsp1.jsp to jsp2.jsp in your Struts application. The easy way of achieving this is to add a hyperlink in jsp1.jsp as follows:
<a href="jsp2.jsp">Go to JSP 2</a>
or even better, as follows:
<html:link page="/jsp2.jsp"> Go to JSP 2</html:link>

Struts provides a built-in Action class called ForwardAction to address this issue. With ForwardAction, the Struts Controller is still in the loop while navigating from jsp1.jsp to jsp2.jsp.
There are two steps involved in using the ForwardAction.

Step 1. First, declare the jsp1 hyperlink that takes you to jsp2 as follows:

Step 2. Add action mapping in the struts-config.xml file:

Add the following action mapping in the struts-config.xml file:

The jsp1.jsp hyperlink now points to "/gotojsp2.do" instead of "jsp2.jsp". This ensures that the controller is still in the loop. The three attributes shown above are mandatory in a ForwardAction. The type attribute is always org.apache.struts.actions.ForwardAction instead of a custom Action of yours. The path attribute identifies the URL path, as any other ActionMapping. The parameter attribute in the above definition is the URL for the next JSP.In the above ActionMapping you might have noticed there is no ActionForm.