I'm new to struts, so bear with me.
I have been working with the "bean" and "template" tags. I have found that a
straightforward (if a bit tedious to do...) enhancement would make it much
easier to construct JSP pages in ways useful for me. Basically, I would
like to use nested tags to specify some information to outer tag,
information that currently is specified only through attributes.
Here's an example. Suppose I have a JSP page that uses the
<template:insert> construct:
...
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-template.tld" prefix="template" %>
...
<template:insert template="t.jsp">
<template:put name="pageName" content="login" direct="true"/>
</template:insert>
Now, in "t.jsp", I would like to use the message tag with the parameter
"pageName" as a "prefix". Something that might look like:
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-bean.tld" prefix="bean" %>
...
<h1>Title is <bean:message key='<template:get
name="pageName"/><%=".title"%>'/></h1>
or perhaps
<h1>Title is <bean:message key='<%=<template:get
name="pageName"/>+".title"%>'/></h1>
There are two problems: (i) this is ugly and not easy to use by most HTML
designers, (ii) it doesn't work anyway. By the time the code gets compiled
to a servlet, it appears that the "key='...'" expression ends up "key=''".
That is, '<template:get name="pageName"/>' is effectively empty.
However, the following message tag structure would solve both problems and
support the capability I'm after (indentation is
for clarity...):
<h1>Title is
<bean:message>
<bean:key>
<template:get name="pageName"/>.title
</bean:key>
</bean:message>
</h1>
In other words, support nested tags to specify the "key" and perhaps other
attributes, so that specifying the values of the attributes is more
flexible.
Many of the "ant" tasks support capabilities like this and it greatly
enhances the power and flexibility of build files.
I have looked at the code for MessageTag (and others). This extension is
straightforward to implement and it can be done in a backwards compatible
way (that is, the old attribute syntax will still work fine).
I'm willing to implement the changes, but before I do so, I wanted to check
with the rest of you to see if there are any good reasons not to proceed.
Thanks,
dean
Dean Wampler, Ph.D.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.powerhousetechnology.com/
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