I've been reading through the mailing list archives and have done a ton of
experimentation, but still can't quite wrap my mind around the solution to
this. Here is a use case. I don't have any code here in front of me to
paste, so I'll do my best to describe it in prose. If I don't do a good
enough job, I'll see if I can dig up some example code when I get home
tonight...
Scenario: Many forms within the application allow the user to select a
certain value from a pop-up hierarchical browser component, which, when
selected, needs to eventually get bound back into a property of the
ActionBean. The "partial" form gets data from a different ActionBean than
the thing which includes it. Here's the general setup for a simple form
which includes this component via a <jsp:include>. For the sake of
simplicity, I'm omitting tons of stuff like wrapping the component in a
popup, demonstrating the functionality of the hierarchy browser, etc:
<s:form actionBeanClass="some.RandomAction">
Field: <s:text name="someField"/>
Another Field: <s:text name="anotherField"/>
Browsable Field:
<s:hidden name="selectedValue"/>
Current Value: ${actionBean.selectedValue}
Browse for New Value:
<jsp:include page="valueSelector.jsp"/>
</s:form>
And here's the "component" jsp (valueSelector.jsp):
<s:useActionBean beanclass="some.BrowserAction"/>
<div id="valueBrowser">
<div id="valueBrowserValues">
<ul>
<c:forEach items="${actionBean.values}" var="value">
<li><a href="#" onclick="select('${value}'">${value}</a></li>
</c:forEach>
</li>
</div>
<a href="#" onclick="next()">Next</a>
</div>
So, I hope I have demonstrated the basic ideas I'm interested with this:
1. When the initial page renders for RandomAction,
a. The "selectedValue" property is displayed, and bound via the
"selectedValue" hidden field.
b. The browser component is rendered, and gets its initial state from the
"values" property of a DIFFERENT ActionBean, "BrowserAction".
2. After initial page render,
a. The user clicks the "Next" link in the browser, which makes an AJAX
call to BrowserAction's "next" event, which fills the "values" property with
the next list of items, and replaces the contents of "valueBrowserValues"
with a freshly rendered view of "valueSelector.jsp" (the JS for this is not
displayed in the example). This works perfectly well.
b. The user clicks on a value, which fires the "select" JavaScript
function, which somehow needs to make its way back to the "selectedValue"
hidden field (and preferably to update the current display value, if it were
to be wrapped in a span or something. This is where my problems lie.
I have no idea how to accomplish this without coupling the component to the
invoking page so that the "select" function can act upon its container's
elements.
Another thought I had was to make the "component" encapsulate the actual
selected value control as well, so that the partial now looks like this:
<s:useActionBean beanclass="some.BrowserAction"/>
<div id="valueBrowser">
<s:hidden name="selectedValue"/>
<div id="valueBrowserValues">
<ul>
<c:forEach items="${actionBean.values}" var="value">
<li><a href="#" onclick="select('${value}'">${value}</a></li>
</c:forEach>
</li>
</div>
<a href="#" onclick="next()">Next</a>
</div>
In this case, the select() function would update the hidden field it "knows"
about... however, selectedValue needs to be bound to the CONTAINING
ActionBean, not the component's ActionBean.
Is this making any sense? AJAX partials with Stripes have been working great
for me up until this point where it became a requirement for my components
to feed data back to the page which is using them. I am starting to wonder
if I'm just going about it the wrong way entirely due to a misunderstanding
of one of the concepts in use...
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