Struts: Non-private Field in ActionForm Class

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

In the following Java example the class RegistrationForm is a Struts framework ActionForm Bean that will maintain user input data from a registration webpage for a online business site. The user will enter registration data and through the Struts framework the RegistrationForm bean will maintain the user data.

public class RegistrationForm extends org.apache.struts.validator.ValidatorForm {


  // variables for registration form
  public String name;
  public String email;
  ...

  public RegistrationForm() {
    super();
  }
  public ActionErrors validate(ActionMapping mapping, HttpServletRequest request) {...}
  ...

}

However, within the RegistrationForm the member variables for the registration form input data are declared public not private. All member variables within a Struts framework ActionForm class must be declared private to prevent the member variables from being modified without using the getter and setter methods. The following example shows the member variables being declared private and getter and setter methods declared for accessing the member variables.

public class RegistrationForm extends org.apache.struts.validator.ValidatorForm {


  // private variables for registration form
  private String name;
  private String email;
  ...

  public RegistrationForm() {
    super();
  }

  public ActionErrors validate(ActionMapping mapping, HttpServletRequest request) {...}




  // getter and setter methods for private variables
  ...
}

See Also