Simple action that delegates to a bean that is managed in a stateful scope. The target of this action can be any object (and generally should be serializable). The target may hold modifiable state as instance members in a thread safe manner.

The resolved bean name will be treated as the identifier of a prototype bean definition in the configured bean factory to retrieve, as well as the name of the attribute to expose the bean in under the configured scope . Subsequent requests to invoke this action will pull the cached bean instance from the scope.

Example:

     <action-state id="executeMethod">
         <action bean="myAction" method="myActionMethod">
             <attribute name="stateful" value="true"/>
         </action>
     </action-state>
 

Note: this action is not ideal for cases when the target bean manages transient references. This is because the bean instance is placed directly into a scope eligible for serialization between requests. Consider a memento-based or metadata-driven based strategy for selectively storing serializable fields separately from the bean itself when you mix transient and serializable references within the same stateful object.