Applying ExceptionHandler in Tiles

[Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com>]

Hey:

I know one of the things people find annoying about working with 
Tiles is the mysterious "blank screen".
When an exception is thrown while the tile is being evaluated, Tiles 
throws a JspException, and the Struts ExceptionHandler (if you're 
using it) tries to forward to the registered path.  This fails 
because the HTTP response has already been committed.

I'm having decent results with a local subclass of the 
ExceptionHandler which only returns an ActionForward if the response 
has not been committed, and then, if the registered path begins with 
"/", it attempts to do a requestDispatcher.include(req, resp) instead.

This is working for me now, because the artists haven't gotten to 
making the error page look good enough for production -- but they 
will, and at that point it will look dorky nested in the tile-set. 
Besides, it doesn't seem like a solution suitable for putting in the 
Struts core -- but it seems like its close.

I propose coming up with a configuration syntax for helping the 
ExceptionHandler do something when the response is committed. 
Perhaps just an alternate property to "path", like "committedPath", 
which would explicitly be used.  The rest of the behavior would be as 
is, and in fact many people who use Tiles would just make "path" 
point to a tile-set which wrapped their "committedPath" tile in a 
typical design for their site.

Am I making sense?  Is this a good idea?  Is "committedPath" the best 
name for the config property for the ExceptionConfig object?

(Would we still want to consider implementing my current strategy as 
a fallback if "committedPath" is not defined?)

I think this is one which will make a lot of people happy if we figure it out!

Joe

-- 
Joe Germuska
Joe@Germuska.com
http://blog.germuska.com
"Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction"  -The Ex

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