I am running into a problem getting my forms working properly with my
Formatters.
In my data model, all my objects derive from a base class that has a
java.lang.Long "id" property, so I have TypeConverters and Formatters
that work generally for everything that operate on this id property.
So far so good. Two such model classes, lets call them "Foo" and
"Bar" are shown here in skeletal form:
public class Foo {
private Long id;
private String name;
/* getters and setters */
}
public class Bar {
private Long id;
private Foo foo;
private String description;
/* getters and setters */
}
The main thing to pay attention to is that Bar has a reference to a
Foo, and that Foo is has both an id and a name (I'll get to that in a
second).
When I create a form to create a new Bar, I set it up roughly like this:
<fieldset>
<ol>
<li>
<stripes:label for="bar.id"/>
<stripes:text name="bar.id"/>
</li>
<li>
<stripes:label for="bar.foo"/>
<stripes:select name="bar.foo">
<stripes:option value="" label="None"/>
<%-- getAllFoos() returns all the Foo objects in the
database --%>
<stripes:options-collection collection="$
{actionBean.allFoos}" label="name" value="id"/>
</stripes:select>
</li>
<li>
<stripes:label for="bar.description"/>
<stripes:text name="bar.description"/>
</li>
</ol>
</fieldset>
This works fine. However, I'm starting to get a lot of Foo objects in
my database now, so a drop-down list is getting a bit cumbersome. I
would like to transition from the <stripes:select> control to a
<stripes:text> control that I've rigged up with an Ajax autocompleter
that lets users start typing the name of the Foo they want to
associate with the Bar object they're creating, and the autocompleter
will bring back name choices from the database. I can use a text
field instead of an options select to because I modified my
TypeConverter to work with either an id or a name.
I try parsing the input string as a Long first and if that works I do
a lookup by ID in my database. If that parsing throws an exception, I
catch it and treat the input string as the name, and do a lookup on
that. This works just fine when I create a new Bar object, but I'm
running into issues when I edit an existing Bar object, related to the
fact that my general formatter Formatter always translates my model
objects into the IDs. Thus, when I edit an existing Bar, the
Formatter displays its ID in the text field, and not its name.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to pass in a value to the <stripes:text>
tag of ${bar.foo.name} but it looks like the <stripes:text> tag looks
for a value in the ActionBean before it looks at either the value
attribute or the body content of the tag.
I know I can create a new Formatter that operates on all Foo objects
to use the "name" property instead of the "id" property and eliminate
this problem, but I'd rather avoid that if at all possible, since I'd
like all my URLs to be consistent (all use numbers, rather than some
use numbers and others use names). Other ways I thought of tackling
this are to just use HTML input fields instead of the Stripes tags and
populate the value myself, although that means I won't get nice
Stripes error messages for that field anymore. I suppose I could also
use a stripes:hidden field with the id of the Foo, use an HTML input
control to get and display the name, and have some JavaScript pass
information back and forth, though that seems a tad baroque, un-
Stripey, and broken without JavaScript.
Is there any other way to accomplish this, or am I horribly abusing
Stripes here? Thanks for any tips or suggestions.
Chris
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