Struts (ActionForm beans)

Question

Does anyone have any information on the
public void reset(ActionMapping, HttpServletRequest)
method that ActionForm classes have.
To be more specific at what points will the Struts framework call this method and why?
Basically I have set the ActionForm with a scope of session and implemented the reset method to reset all my form variables.
Yet every time the associated Action class is called the data is reset.
I assumed this would only happen if I had set the scope as request.
Should this be happening or should I not be implementing the reset method in the ActionForm bean?

Answer 1

I checked out the source code and the main ActionServlet calls the ActionForm reset method on each request. I'm not sure what you mean by "set the ActionForm with a scope of session", but ActionServlet does not check anything, it just calls reset() as part of processPopulate().
I think the idea is that the ActionForm reflects whatever is coming in from the request and a bean would perform persistence. If you are using the ActionForm to save across requests, you may need special logic in reset() to determine which elements to reset and when.
Hope this helps. By the way, if you are doing a lot of Struts work, I recommend downloading the source code for research purposes and for customizing.