I dont think this approach will work if you need transactional control across the different "tabs" of the wizard. For example if it is a registration wizard that collects contact info and billing info on different tabs, using different forms and commiting to the database will leave you with a lot of problems.
We use a single form and store it in the session rather than the request eliminating the need for the hidden variables as proposed by somebody else. I notice that this is what you originally proposed. This approach works very well for us (thought there is a bit of clean-up at the cancel or submit) -----Original Message----- From: Pete Carapetyan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 10:22 AM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Re: Wizard Interface question Pete Serafin wrote: > I am trying to develop an interface for entering data for one object > across multiple forms as in a wizard interface. Can anyone describe the > best way to approach the design of this type of functionality. Doubt that there is any one right way, but webAppWriter keeps everything in a database, and uses many different forms, one for each of the CRUD operations for each of the three tables it maintains (App, Tables, Fields). Lots of forms, but each only has to do one thing. This approach allows anyone to start or stop anywhere within the process, and their state is always intact and can be picked up at any stage within the process. Oddly enough, this same thing is true of each of the applications it produces, though I never thought of them as Wizard forms before. To be a wizard, all it takes is some result that happens after the data is sucked in. It would seem that this is much more scalable than sticking everything in a session, but it was also a lot easier for me to do this way. It seems to be the way Expresso is designed to work. Plus, users would go nuts if they had to get everything done in a session. Does it work ? Has about 9 months without a problem, though only since posting on the struts resource page has it been getting heavy use. > I was > thinking that the actionforms would be stored in the user session until > a submit to database or a cancel is requested. Is this the best way to > handle this? Thanks, > > Pete Serafin > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- Pete Carapetyan http://datafundamentals.com Java Development Services Open standards technology for commercial profitability -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
