Hallo, I'm very new to MVC Frontends but thing I have noticed is that many struts applications replicate business objects through forms, which are just the string representation of the business data.
I have noticed that there has been some discussion about automatically populating non-String Bean fields through the RequestProcessor facility. Therefore I am submitting a working sugestion, which may or may not seem sensible. As I said, this is just a first version of a solution to a problem that I am confronted with in a productive situation, so there are many details which would need to brushed up, if this approach was to be followed any further (e.g. XML-Configuration, Default configurations, creating a separate RequestProcessor, examples, testing, etc). Briefly: - I tentatively called this the FromString plugin (because that's what it does). - It uses the plugin mechanism. - For speeds sake, I patched the RequestProcessor and the RequestUtils (although one could create a separate RP, but I didn't because I gathered through various discussion threads that the RP interface is going to be changed - but correct if I'm wrong). - It has a static configuration at the moment (so any further developement would need to use the Digester mechanism). - Because of this static config, the package contains a TestForm, in order to prevent a cyclical dependency during deployment (for testing). - It just provides the String2java.util.Date conversion at the moment. - It has been tested with a simple JSP that sets a bean field of the type java.util.Date - The plugin essentially defines a collection of conversion services, which can be configured at the field level of any given bean. - For example, Bean XXX has fields 1 to n, where field i is a Date field. Therefore the field[i] of XXXBean is mapped to Conversion object which is invoked when the Bean gets populated after the View form has been submitted. - Of course, Conversion objects can be reused and one can map any number of fields in any bean. - (Maybe I've forgotten something, but I don't think so) As I mentioned above, I would like to use such a mechanism in production code, but if anybody feels that this kind of thing might be useful for the general framework, I would quite happy to brush it up and submit it as open source code, rather than just implementing proprietry code (of course taking any further suggestions into account). Cheers, Ben
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