Result Types

Overview

Results of an Action are used in Webwork to map to a view implementation(ex. jsp, vm, html) or another action. Keep in mind though, the com.opensymphony.xwork.Result interface represents a generic interface for all action execution results, whether that be displaying a webpage, generating an email, sending a JMS message, etc.

Result types define classes and map them to names to be referred in the action configuration results. This serves as a shorthand name-value pair for these classes.

<!-- xwork.xml  -->

<action name="bar" class="myPackage.barAction">
  <result name="success" type="dispatcher">
    <param name="location">foo.jsp</param>
  </result>
  <result name="error" type="dispatcher">
    <param name="location">error.jsp</param>
  </result>
</action>

Result Types

Webwork provides several implementations of the com.opensymphony.xwork.Result interface to make web-based interactions with your actions simple. These result types include:

Results are specified in a xwork xml config file(xwork.xml) nested inside <action>. The location param is the default parameter, meaning you can specify the location two ways:

<action name="bar" class="myPackage.barAction">
  <result name="success" type="dispatcher">
    <param name="location">foo.jsp</param>
  </result>
</action>

or

<action name="bar" class="myPackage.barAction">
  <result name="success" type="dispatcher">foo.jsp</result>
</action>

NOTE: You can also specify global-results to use with multiple actions. This can save time from having to add the same result to many different actions. See global-results

Dispatcher

Includes or forwards a view (usually a jsp)

<result name="success" type="dispatcher">
    <param name="location">foo.jsp</param>
</result>

Redirect

The response is told to redirect the browser to the specified location. The consequence of doing this means that the action that was just executed is lost or no longer available. This is because actions are built on a single-thread model.
NOTE: You may want to set the parse attribute to false so the location is not parsed for Ognl expressions.

<result name="success" type="redirect">
    <param name="location">foo.jsp</param>
    <param name="parse">false</param>
</result>

Action Chaining

A special kind of view that invokes GenericDispatch (using the previously existing ActionContext) and executes another action. This is useful if you need to execute one action immediately after another.

<result name="success" type="chain">
    <param name="actionName">bar</param>
    <param name="namespace">/foo</param>
</result>

invokes this

<action name="bar" class="myPackage.barAction">
    ...
</action>

Velocity

This result mocks a JSP execution environment and then displays a Velocity template that will be streamed directly to the servlet output.

<result name="success" type="velocity">
    <param name="location">foo.vm</param>
</result>

FreeMarker

<result name="success" type="freemarker">foo.ftl</result>

JasperReports

Generates a JasperReports report using the specified format or PDF if no format is specified.

<result name="success" type="jasper">
    <param name="location">foo.jasper</param>
    <param name="dataSource">mySource</param>
    <param name="format">CSV</param>
</result>

or for pdf

<result name="success" type="jasper">
    <param name="location">foo.jasper</param>
    <param name="dataSource">mySource</param>
</result>

XML/XSL

Interfaces with xml transformations.

<result name="success" type="xslt">foo.xslt</result>