D J wrote:
> Imagine a simple Model 2 web-app that allows user to search an
> employee database. There are 3 steps in this process (excluding
> error handling).
>
> 1) User enters name to search for (ie. "Smith")
> 2) All the matching employees are displayed in a list of names (first
> and last name). The user click on one of the names (or a button
> beside the name)
> 3) The entire employee information now would appear.
>
> I think I under how to implement the processing between step 2 and
> step 3. Clicking on one of the names could send the request to a
> servlet. Parameters like an employee number could be part of the URL
> request. The servlet would use the request parameters to query the
> end database. The results from database would be placed into an
> Employee bean that is sent to a JSP page for display (step 3).
>
> But how do you use beans to perform step #2? Are the results of the
> database query stored into a kinda of "EmployeeSearchResults" bean
> that would allow multiple values? Or could an enumeration of
> Employee beans be used?
>
My approach to this would be something like this: define an
EmployeeSearchResults bean that has a multivalued property named "employee"
that returns an Employee bean (you can re-use the one you created for step 3).
In other words, your bean would have a method like this:
Employee getEmployee(int index);
I am assuming that you've defined the Employee bean to have (among others)
first name and last name properties:
String getFirstName();
String getLastName();
Now, you can use all of this to construct an HTML table containing the results,
by using the <LOOP> tag in your JSP page:
<usebean name="searchResults" type="...">
</usebean>
<table>
<tr>
<th>First Name</th>
<th>LastName</th>
</tr>
<loop property="searchResults:employee" propertyelement="i">
<tr>
<td><display property="i:firstName"></td>
<td><display property="i:lastName"></td>
</tr>
</loop>
</table>
I use "i" to be reminiscent of the usual loop control variable naming
convention. Loops can also be nested, and I would use "j" for the next level,
and so on.
Note that you don't have to declare anything about the Employee bean at all,
because the JSP page introspects as necessary to get its properties. That's
pretty slick in my book.
Craig McClanahan
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