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Dependencies

Update Struts dependencies to 2.5.

Remove the following plugin dependencies because they were dropped and aren't supported anymore.

• Dojo Plugin
• Codebehind Plugin
• JSF Plugin
• Struts1 Plugin

Please be aware that the framework is using Log4j2 now as a main logging layer, the existing old logging layer is deprecated and will be removed soon. Log4j2 supports many different logging implementations, please check documentations for more details.

StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter

...

<!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
        "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.5//EN"
        "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.5.dtd">

HTML 5

All the core themes are now HTML 5 compliant which means using a required attribute in your tags will produce a proper browser's validation.

Tags attributes

The id attribute was replaced with var attribute in the following tags.

...

For additional info see WW-3909.

Tiles

Depending on from which version of struts you upgrade and whether you used tiles-plugin or tiles3-plugin you may need to do different steps.

Struts 2.5 just provides a tiles-plugin which uses Tiles3. So support for Tiles2 has been dropped as well as the name tiles3-plugin.

Now the only maven dependency looks like this:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.struts</groupId>
            <artifactId>struts2-tiles-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>${struts2.version}</version>
        </dependency>

You may need to update DTD in your tiles.xml files to Tiles3:

<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
       "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 3.0//EN"
       "http://tiles.apache.org/dtds/tiles-config_3_0.dtd">

A Listener in web.xml is required. It is not necessary to configure paths to tiles.xml files here as they are picked up automatically.

<listener>
  <listener-class>org.apache.struts2.tiles.StrutsTilesListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Optionally you may remove TilesDefinitions from XML and annotate actions instead. See Tiles Plugin for more details.

Temp/Work directory of ApplicationServer/ServletContainer

Users reported it was necessary for them to remove temp/work directory of their ApplicationServer/ServletContainer. Likely to force server to recompile JSPs.

New Locale aware conversion logic

As from Struts 2.5.12 a new conversion logic was introduced which can affect your applications when using uncommon solutions. One of these is to use a number literals in Freemarker template. In such case Freemarker treats them as numbers (as BigDecimals) and Struts logic converts them to a string with decimal zero, see the example below:

<@s.textfield name="userId" value=35/>

this snippet will produce the following Html control:

<input type="text" name="userId" value="35.0"/>

To resolves this problem you must add quotes around the value:

<@s.textfield name="userId" value="35"/>

This is due how Freemarker treats a number literals.