Re: Struts 7 Migration Issues

wt., 9 wrz 2025 o 08:53 Zoran Avtarovski <[email protected]> napisa=
=C5=82(a):
>
> Hi Guys,
>
> We are moving forward with our plans to migrate from Struts6/Tomcat9 to
> Struts7/Tomcat11 but we've hit a few snags I was hoping someone else has
> experienced and hopefully solved.
>
> The first and biggest issue is with Tomcat 11. The app runs as expected
> but no pages are rendered and by that I mean nothing at all. Our logs
> don't show any errors - we are using log4j2 with DEBUG as the ROOT level
> default. The strange thing is when we run the same app on Tomcat 10.1.45
> it works as expected, except for one possibly related issue.
>
> We are using struts 7.0.3 with Tomcat 11.0.10 and Sitemesh 3.2.2 as our
> decorator, we also tried Sitemesh 3.2.1 which made no difference.
>
> Web.xml is configured as below:
>
> <filter-mapping>
>          <filter-name>struts-prepare</filter-name>
>          <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
>      </filter-mapping>
>
>      <filter-mapping>
>          <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>
>          <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
>      </filter-mapping>
>
>      <filter-mapping>
>          <filter-name>struts-execute</filter-name>
>          <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
>      </filter-mapping>
>
> This is the critical issue as we want to identify the cause of the issue
> and resolve rather than put it off.
>
>
> The second issue is related to sitemesh, which the first issue may also
> be. When we run the app on Tomcat 10 struts actions aren't identified in
> the path attribute only the resulting jsp is. Let me explain, say we
> have a test action configured in my struts.xml as such:
>
> <action name=3D"testAction" class=3D"testActionClass" method=3D"test">
>       <result>/WEB-INF/pages/testPage.jsp</result>
> </action>
>
> If I configure sitemesh like this:
>
> <mapping decorator=3D"mainDecorator.jsp"/>
> <mapping path=3D"*/testAction.action" decorator=3D"testDecorator.jsp"/>
>
> The result is incorrectly decorated using the default mainDecorator,
> this works correctly in our struts 6 setup which is more or less
> identical, but if I change it to this:
>
> <mapping decorator=3D"mainDecorator.jsp"/>
> <mapping path=3D"*/testPage.jsp" decorator=3D"testDecorator.jsp"/>
>
> The page is decorated correctly. As you can imagine that's not what we
> want. Mapping to the actions is a far more elegant and manageable.
>
> The documentation for sitemesh is a bit thin on their site so any
> assistance would be appreciated.

Please take a look at this PR, it should help you:
https://github.com/apache/struts-examples/pull/461

Just to clarify, only Sitemesh 3.2.2 supports JakartaEE so you must
use this version when running Struts 7. There is an issue with
providing a custom integration as basically there is no extension
points in the new Sitemesh version, I reported that issue yet no luck
https://github.com/sitemesh/sitemesh3/issues/141

Not sure which approach you want to achieve, but you can take a look
on this issue and try to play by setting FORWARD_SERVLET_PATH to
different values (action path or JSP path)
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WW-5463


Cheers
=C5=81ukasz