Action aliasing means that you give an alternate name to an action. This is very useful if you want to reuse an action in multiple action chains without having to corrupt the logic of the action itself with knowledge of this.

An example of this would be that we have an action AdjustPrice that calculates discounts for the current user in a shop application. We might want to have different steps for cars than we want for groceries but the discount scheme is the same so we want to reuse this code. With some simple action aliasing in views.properties we can do this easily:

AdjustCarPrice.action=SelectCar
AdjustCarPrice.success=ChangeCarPrice.action
ChangeCarPrice.action=AdjustPrice
ChangeCarPrice.success=showcar.jsp

AdjustFoodPrice.action=SelectFood
AdjustFoodPrice.success=ChangeFoodPrice.action
ChangeFoodPrice.action=AdjustPrice
ChangeFoodPrice.success=showfood.jsp