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Common Methods

The methods that you write for your WebObjects application provide the behavior that makes your application unique. Because you are writing subclasses of WOApplication, WOSession, WOComponent, and WODirectAction you inherit the methods provided by those classes. These inherited methods take care of the details of receiving HTTP requests and generating responses. However, you'll sometimes find that you need to override some of the inherited methods to perform certain tasks.

This chapter describes the types of methods that you generally write in a WebObjects application. These types are:

• Action methods
• Initialization and deallocation methods
• Request-handling methods

As you're writing methods, refer to the class specifications for WOApplication, WOSession, WOComponent, and WODirectAction to learn which messages you can send to these objects. The class specifications are in the online book WebObjects Class Reference.

Action Methods

Component Actions

Direct Actions

Suppressing Session IDs in a Direct Action URL

Setting the Default Request Handler

Initialization and Deallocation Methods

The Structure of init

Application Initialization

Session Initialization

Component Initialization

WODirectAction Initialization

Component-Action Request-Handling Methods

Request Handling Initialization and Post-Processing

Application Awake

Session Awake

Component Awake

Taking Input Values From a Request

Invoking an Action

Limitations on Direct Requests

Generating a Response

First Section