Stripes MVC Model Data

I am experienced with Spring MVC and am trying out Stripes to decide whether to try it out for a new project.

In Spring MVC I would prepare model data and pass it to the view by adding it to a map in the ModelAndView instance created by my controller. I am having trouble finding the equivalent of this for Stripes.

It seems like the closest parallel is to have an ActionBean prepare my model data and add it to the HttpSession. A ForwardRedirect is used to load the view and the data is accessed from the session.

Is there better support for a front controller provided by Stripes, or is this a totally different design principle than Spring MVC? (ie I have to invoke methods from the view using EL to retrieve data, as some of the examples do)

Thanks!

Solution

A typical MVC design in Stripes would look like something like the code below.

The JPA entity is automaticaly loaded by a Stripes interceptor provided by Stripersist (but this can also easily implemented on your own if you wish). Thus in this example, requesting http://your.app/show-order-12.html will load a order with id 12 from the database and will show it on the page.

Controller (OrderAction.java):

@UrlBinding("/show-order-{order=}.html")
public class OrderAction implements ActionBean {
    private ActionBeanContext context;
    private Order order;

    public ActionBeanContext getContext() {
        return context;
    }

    public void setContext(ActionBeanContext context) {
        this.context = context;
    }

    public void setOrder(Order order) {
        this.order = order;
    }

    public String getOrder() {
        return order;
    }

    @DefaultHandler
    public Resolution view() {
        return new ForwardResolution(“/WEB-INF/jsp/order.jsp”);
    }
}

View (order.jsp):

<html><body>
    Order id: ${actionBean.order.id}<br/>
    Order name: ${actionBean.order.name)<br/>
    Order total: ${actionBean.order.total)<br/>
</body></html>

Model (Order.java):

@Entity
public class Order implements Serializable {
    @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Integer id;

    private String name;
    private Integer total;

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public Integer getTotal() {
        return total;
    }   
}

BTW there is an really excellent short(!) book on Stripes that covers all these things:

Stripes: ...and Java Web Development Is Fun Again