Behavioral Struts Interview Questions & Answers:

1. How the exceptions are handled in struts?

Exceptions in Struts are handled in two ways:

► Programmatic exception handling :
Explicit try/catch blocks in any code that can throw exception. It works well when custom value (i.e., of variable) needed when error occurs.

► Declarative exception handling :You can either define <global-exceptions> handling tags in your struts-config.xml or define the exception handling tags within <action></action> tag. It works well when custom page needed when error occurs. This approach applies only to exceptions thrown by Actions.

<global-exceptions>
<exception key="some.key"
type="java.lang.NullPointerException"
path="/WEB-INF/errors/null.jsp"/>
</global-exceptions>

or

<exception key="some.key"
type="package.SomeException"
path="/WEB-INF/somepage.jsp"/>

2. What are the various Struts tag libraries?

The various Struts tag libraries are:

► HTML Tags
► Bean Tags
► Logic Tags
► Template Tags
► Nested Tags
► Tiles Tags

3. How to display validation errors on jsp page?

<html:errors/> tag displays all the errors. <html:errors/> iterates over ActionErrors request attribute.

4. What is DynaActionForm?

A specialized subclass of ActionForm that allows the creation of form beans with dynamic sets of properties (configured in configuration file), without requiring the developer to create a Java class for each type of form bean.

5. What is SwitchAction?

The SwitchAction class provides a means to switch from a resource in one module to another resource in a different module. SwitchAction is useful only if you have multiple modules in your Struts application. The SwitchAction class can be used as is, without extending.

6. What is difference between LookupDispatchAction and DispatchAction?

The difference between LookupDispatchAction and DispatchAction is that the actual method that gets called in LookupDispatchAction is based on a lookup of a key value instead of specifying the method name directly.

7. What is the use of LookupDispatchAction?

LookupDispatchAction is useful if the method name in the Action is not driven by its name in the front end, but by the Locale independent key into the resource bundle. Since the key is always the same, the LookupDispatchAction shields your application from the side effects of I18N.

8. What is LookupDispatchAction?

The LookupDispatchAction is a subclass of DispatchAction. It does a reverse lookup on the resource bundle to get the key and then gets the method whose name is associated with the key into the Resource Bundle.

9. What is the difference between ForwardAction and IncludeAction?

The difference is that you need to use the IncludeAction only if the action is going to be included by another action or jsp. Use ForwardAction to forward a request to another resource in your application, such as a Servlet that already does business logic processing or even another JSP page.

10. What is IncludeAction?

The IncludeAction class is useful when you want to integrate Struts into an application that uses Servlets. Use the IncludeAction class to include another resource in the response to the request being processed.