A quick review of debugging Struts applications

I had worked on a Struts web application a couple of years ago, and within our team I am still considered the "expert" on that application. So yesterday, when something wasn't working correctly, a teammate approached me and asked for help. As I walked her through what was going on, I made it a point NOT to rely on any knowledge of the application (after all, it has been two years and several maintenance programmers since I have worked on the application.) Here's what we did:

• Based on the URL, track down the action mapping
• Look in the struts-config.xml file and find the JSP that is rendered
• Examine the JSP and see where the data is coming from; identify the form object that holds the data
• Back in struts-config.xml, find the action that does the work
• In the action, look at how the form is populated

In finding and resolving the problem, I didn't have to use any tacit knowledge of application. Instead, we just ran the application, identified the problem, and tracked it back to the code that was causing the problem.