I am throwing this post out there in the hopes that it will either spawn a solid answer or at least discussion towards addressing these issues that I am facing with MVC/Struts. So, here I go...
It is an issue I think is kind of addressed with Plugins but gives no inline processing options. The issue becomes one of preparing data for the view without having to write an Action Class for every possible page someone might view. For example I have a shopping cart and I have dynamic content that is produced seperate from the shopping cart. The dynamic content shows up side by side with the shopping cart content. I would have to produce an Action class for that particular scenario in order to prepare data for the shopping cart and the dynamic content. Wouldn't it be easier if there were a way to allow inline processing, like an internal struts filter, that could be configured in an xml file and would pass the request through a processing that could prepare different data combinations without having to hardcode everything. So in my afformentioned scenario I would pass the request through some filtering process (I imagine it would be an interface) that is predefined in an xml doc and then provide the data to the page for display. For many cases I wouldn't have to touch the action class. Conditional info can be contained within the filters (a login bean of sorts). The advantage of doing this over using Filters (2.3/1.2) is that you can configure it within struts on specific Action Classes or maybe url patterns and define the order of processing in an xml doc. So then you could produce a custom action class and assign common processing to the Action class without having to touch a stitch of code or use a generic class and give it common processing requirements. I know this is probably an oversimplification. But, it doesn't seem entirely impossible. I would be willing to work on this if I though it would be possible to have it included into struts in the future. Also, if someone is doing this already. I would love to get my grubby fingers on it. Brandon Goodin Phase Web and Multimedia P (406) 862-2245 F (406) 862-0354 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.phase.ws -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
