How to manage Locale info in the URL path, but not the query string

Question

We are building an application using Struts 1.1 and Tiles, on Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.3...
I know this is a strange question... but we have a requirement to represent the locale info in the URL string using one of the following options:
option 1: /eng/page.do?id=2 for english.../fra/page.do?id=2
option 2: /page-eng.do?id=2 for english.... and /page-fra.do?id=2 for french
We need to represent the 3 letter ISO lang code either in the directory structure, or suffix the page name (in our case, the struts action name)... we cannot replicate this using a parameter in the query string. I know this is odd, but that is what we are told to implement.
Is there any robust way of implementing either option in Struts 1.1, JSP, JSTL etc...?
Currently, we are looking at using a servlet filter to intercept the HTTP requests, parse the URL string, and extract the ISO lang value, and set locale and forward on the request.
This poses a few problems... adding additional action mappings (page-eng... page-fra... page) to our struts-xml.config file to handle lang permuations... but the biggest issue is all the embedded html:link action values throughout our code...
Because all our public facing URLs must comply with the rule, we need to change the html:link action to point to a different action, based on locale.
Very inefficent, and I'm sure not industry standard best practice... we are using Tiles, and resource bundles for all our labels etc... but fall short in meeting this rule with regards to URLs and locale.
Any advice or tips etc.. is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The filter option sounds like a good solution. So it can receive the urls and parse them appropriately.
You just need to take it one step further.
Additional actionmappings in your struts-config should not be necessary.
Filter:
- analyses the url and sets the appropriate locale
- adjusts the url such that the next level of the chain does not have to know anything about the locale being encoded in the url string.
Thus your struts classes and mappings can remain unchanged
/eng/page.do or /fra/page.do once through the filter should just look like /page.do to struts.
That should get rid of half of your headache.
Next the issue of generating urls.
There are two approaches I can see here
1 - use the filter approach again, this time with some post processing. Gather the generated HTML in a buffer, and do a find/replace on any urls generated, to put the locale encoding into them.
2 - Customise struts to produce urls in this format. This would involve the html:link tag, and the html:form tag at the least (maybe others?). Get the source code for struts, and grab the html:link tag code. Extend that class to generate urls as you want them to be generated. I think you would need to extend the class org.apache.struts.taglib.html.LinkTag and override the protected method calculateURL. You would then have to edit/modify the struts-html tld to point the link tag at your classes rather than the standard ones.
Option 1 is architecturally good because it gives you a well defined layer/border between having the locale encoded in the url, and not having it there. However it involves doing a find/replace on every html going out. This would catch all urls, whether generated by html:link tag or not.
Option 2 requires customising struts for your own requirements, which may be a bit daunting, but has the advantage of generating the urls correctly without the extra overhead involved with option 1. Of course you would have to ensure that ALL urls are generated with the html:link tag.
On reflection, I think option 1 is preferable, as both easier and quicker to implement, and doing a better separation in the architecture.
Cheers,
evnafets