Where to put struts.xml

Question

With Struts2 we have to have struts.xml in the class path, so it no longer works to have it under WEB-INF. So the way I got my project to deploy was to stick it under WEB-INF/classes and have it include ../struts2.xml

2 Problems:

1. Eclipse cleans out the classes folder when I do a rebuild, so it deletes struts.xml
2. Eclipse doesn't show the classes folder in my project browser, so its a poor place to stick config files in the first place.

How are you Struts2 Eclipse developers doing this?

Answer 1

You can either just put the struts.xml at the root of your source directory or set up an additional resources source directory and put it there. Eclipse quite happily copies it to WEB-INF/classes for you when it does a compilation.

Answer 2

I am late to the party, we can configure the struts.xml in any directory in the classpath of the web application, but provide the location using the "config" init parameter of the filter configuration in web.xml as below, if my struts.xml file is in "/com/resources/" directory.

   <filter>
        <filter-name>action</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.ng.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter</filter-class>
         <init-param>
            <param-name>config</param-name>
            <param-value>struts-default.xml,struts-plugin.xml,/com/resources/struts.xml</param-value>
         </init-param>
    </filter>

If we don't provide a config init parameter struts2 by default takes 3 values "struts-default.xml,struts-plugin.xml,struts.xml", you can see the struts2 Dispatcher class code below which will configure these 3 files to the configuration manager.

String configPaths = (String)this.initParams.get("config");
if (configPaths == null) {
  configPaths = "struts-default.xml,struts-plugin.xml,struts.xml";
}
String[] files = configPaths.split("\\s*[,]\\s*");
for (String file : files)
  if (file.endsWith(".xml")) {
    if ("xwork.xml".equals(file))
      this.configurationManager.addContainerProvider(createXmlConfigurationProvider(file, false));
    else
      this.configurationManager.addContainerProvider(createStrutsXmlConfigurationProvider(file, false, this.servletContext));
  }