Hi, I am following along the tutorials online getting started with Struts2. I am loving it, but I noticed something bazaar and was wondering what anyone has to say about it.
When you have an action <action name="Login" ....> and you add an underscore or ! followed by an asterisk (*), to make it <action name="Login_*" ...> or <action name="Login!*" ...> then when you reference the url http://localhost:8080/myapp/Login.action - why does the action Login_* get called? I would think that the underscore is now needed in order to call this action! Basically, now LoginXyz.action does not work, yet Login.action does - as does Login_xyz.action (which is the only one that makes sense to me). So, does the special character have any special teatment? If so, which characters are teated specially aside from the ! and _ characters, and is this documented anywhere? Thanks for your help, EC -- The particular case was first brought to attention in the validation section of the tutorial ( http://struts.apache.org/2.x/docs/validating-input.html). It was suggested that if you do not wish to validate before there was any user input, add a wildcard (*) after a special character to the action ("_" in the article, but in my downloaded source for the blank struts2 app it was the "!"). That would make it Login_* (or Login!*). Whether I go to the Login.action or the Login_any-action-but-input.action it works and validates, returning back to the page with the validation comment (xyz is required etc). The question struck me: why does it work for Login.action!!?? Thanks, again.
