We have a Struts 2 web application that’s used by pretty much every employee to manage and configure jobs for our server farm. We’re working on a plan to make a dashboard for customers, so they can see their own jobs, and a very simple display of its status (“in process”, “ready for proofing”, “finished”, etc). All of the pages the customers can see will have much less information than the employees’ views, and there will be no way to edit or change anything. But in the end, they’re essentially two separate views of the same information: one very simple, one more complex and controllable.
The naive way to do this, is to have if/elses in every single jsp:
<s:if test="user.role == 'customer'">
<!-- TODO - Display simple customer view -->
</s:if>
<s:else>
<!-- TODO - Display complex employee view -->
</s:else>
Is there a simpler way to do this? Can I create two separate directories of jsps, one named “customer” and one named “employee” (or default or something) and then have Struts key off of a property in my action to decide which directory to check?
Or is there another way that I can do this?
I would suggest managing this inside your controller. Add a new view for the customer, and check the user’s role in your controller and display the appropriate view. This will leave your existing view’s untouched, and adds the ability to have truly custom views for your customers.