Package changes

• ActionSupport has moved from webwork.ActionSupport to com.opensymphony.xwork.ActionSupport
  • doExecute() no longer exists, override execute()
  • the methods addError and addErrorMessage are now addFieldError and addActionError respectively

Configuration changes

• actions.xml/views.properties needs to be converted to xwork.xml
  If you're using an actions.xml file to configure your webwork 1, you can use the attached XSLT to convert the actions.xml file to a vanilla xwork.xml file.
  To apply this XSLT, you'll need to do the following:
  Get a copy of the XSLT. You can find the latest version in CVS in webwork/src/etc/actions.xsl . Next, find yourself an XSLT rendering engine. Xalan is a good choice and can be found at http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/index.html
  Finally, do the conversion.

java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN actions.xml -XSL actions.xsl -OUT xwork.xml

Remember that you'll need to Xalan libraries in your classpath to run the above command.
If you want to look at these pages directly in your browser, I recommend user Internet Explorer as it automagically formats XML documents reasonably. There one caveat though. WW1 had a way to shorten the declaration of actions by allowing you to specify a package prefix in webwork.properties file. Since this information is outside the actions.xml file, the XSLT is unable to take advantage of it. Consequently, you might need to edit the xwork.xml file to update the class names.

If the webwork.MigrationRuntimeConfiguration does not find the action configuration using the RuntimeConfiguration from the supplied RuntimeConfiguration (which is acquried from the Xwork DefaultConfiguration and will load configurations from all of the sources configured for XWork / WebWork2), it will build an ActionConfiguration by instantiating an Action using the ActionFactories from WebWork 1.x. The ActionFactory stack used is a subset of the default ActionFactory stack used in WebWork 1.x:

factory = new JavaActionFactory();
        factory = new ScriptActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new XMLActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new PrefixActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new JspActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new CommandActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new AliasingActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new CommandActionFactoryProxy(factory);
        factory = new ContextActionFactoryProxy(factory);

Some of the ActionFactory classes have been left out as they are handled by Interceptors in WebWork2. If the Action instance is created (meaning that the configuration has been found in the webwork.properties or actions.xml files used by the WebWork 1.x configuration classes) a parameter Map is created by introspecting the Action instance. A Map is needed for results and, again, WebWork 1.x used a pull paradigm to find results when they were needed, so a LazyResultMap is created which extends HashMap and overrides get() to look up the Result configuration if it has not previously been loaded. If the result ends in the Action suffix (defaulting to ".action"), then a ChainingResult is created, otherwise a ServletDispatcherResult is created. Using the Action class of the instantiated Action, the Map of parameters introspected from the Action instance, and the LazyResultMap, a new ActionConfig is created. The ActionConfig is saved into a special Package, "webwork-migration", so that it will pick up the default Interceptor stack defined for that package. The "webwork-migration" package is defined in a webwork-migration.xml file which is included in the migration jar file and which is automatically added to the Xwork configuration providers when the MigrationConfiguration is used:

<!DOCTYPE xwork PUBLIC "-//OpenSymphony Group//XWork 1.0//EN" "http://www.opensymphony.com/xwork/xwork-1.0.dtd">

<xwork>
    <include file="webwork-default.xml"/>
    <package name="webwork-migration" abstract="true" extends="webwork-default">
        <interceptors>
            <interceptor-stack name="migrationStack">
                <interceptor-ref name="timer"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="logger"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="chain"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="static-params"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="prepare"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="params"/>
                <interceptor-ref name="workflow"/>
            </interceptor-stack>
        </interceptors>
        <default-interceptor-ref name="migrationStack"/>
    </package>
</xwork>

Here we can see that a number of the functions previously performed by ActionFactories in WebWork 1.x are now replaced by Interceptors in WebWork2, including the parameters, the chaining, calling prepare(), and the workflow (which was formerly implemented in ActionSupport in WebWork 1.x).

Tag Changes

property

The property tag is now only used to print out values from the stack. In WW1, it was also used to set a variable in the scope, and to push properties to the top of the stack. These functions are now performed by the set and push tags.

action tag

The action tag does not evaluate the body section any more and does not push the executed action onto the ValueStack. Instead, use the "id" attribute to assign a name to the action and reference it as "#id".

Examples

Lets enumerate some examples of differences between code snips using WW:WebWork and WW:WebWork.

• New JSP syntax

Webwork 1

<ww:property value="a/b">
  <ww:property value="foo" />
</ww:property>

<ww:push value="a.b">
  <ww:property value="foo" />
</ww:push>

• List errors posted by an Action
  Webwork 1

  <webwork:if test="hasErrorMessages == true">
    ERROR:<br />
    <font color="red">
      <webwork:iterator value="errorMessages">
        <webwork:property/><br />
      </webwork:iterator>
    </font>
  </webwork:if>

  
  Webwork 2

  <webwork:if test="hasErrors()">
    ERROR:<br />
    <font color="red">
      <webwork:iterator value="actionErrors">
        <webwork:property/><br />
      </webwork:iterator>
    </font>
  </webwork:if>

Update your web.xml file

• If you're using Velocity for views, you'll need to make sure you have the following snippet. Specifically note that the <load-on-startup> tag is now required so that the servlet can initialize some important Velocity properties.

  <servlet>
      <servlet-name>velocity</servlet-name>
      <servlet-class>com.opensymphony.webwork.views.velocity.WebWorkVelocityServlet</servlet-class>
      <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>

• Set the property webwork.velocity.configfile in your _webwork.properties_. For example:

  webwork.velocity.configfile=velocity.properties

1. context root (web root)
2. WEB-INF/
3. classpath

• Additional Steps:
• 1. If you used the <ww:action taglib in 1.3… you used to refernece the java Action classname. In 2.x this reference is now the action name not the class. you will need to change all your old references in your view.

ResultException doesn't exist anymore

It might be possible to copy WW1's ResultException, and write an Interceptor that catches the ResultExceptions and add the result of getMessage() to the actionErrors of the
executed Action and return ResultException.getResult().

DateFormatter doesn't exist anymore

addError(String, String) in webwork.action.ActionSupport has been removed

The new method to use is addFieldError(String, String).

addErrorMessage(String) in webwork.action.ActionSupport has been removed

webwork.util.ValueStack has been removed

The ValueStack is com.opensymphony.xwork.util.OgnlValueStack

An instance of the ValueStack can be obtained by using ActionContext.getContext().getValueStack instead of the old ValueStack.getStack().

*Aware-Interfaces have been removed

CommandDriven interface removed

The CommandDriven interface is removed. It is not neccesary to implement a special interface when working with commands anymore. Use the method attribute in your action-Element in xwork.xml to tell xwork which method to invoke on your action.

isCommand(String) method has been removed