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Templates ae are loaded first by searching the application and then by searching the classpath. If a template needs to be overridden, an edited copy can be placed in the application, so that is found first.

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Templates are loaded based the template directory and theme name (see Selecting Themes). The template directory is defined by the struts.ui.templateDir property in struts.properties (defaults to template). If a tag is using the ajax xhtml theme, the following two locations will be searched (in this order):

For performance reasons, you may want to prefer the first location, although the second one is more flexible. See Performance Tuning for a discussion on this topic.

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