What if we extracted the creation of Actions and ActionForms (including DynaActionForms) into an ActionFactory, overridable by the user?
In general, I'm in favor. I disagree with Vic's assertion, paraphrased "factories are too complicated; it's good enough to directly call the constructor" -- certainly that is appropriate for some classes, but by centralizing expertise for creating instances within a single class, you have a lot more flexibility to make an across-the-board change to what exactly which objects are created. (Something to which Martin alluded while I was composing this message.)
I won't elaborate too much at the risk of hijacking, but I wonder if we could also use this as an easy step towards an API whereby an Action could request an "output form" instance for pre-population. (That is, the form bean which would back an html:form block in the destination view, as opposed to the "input form" which encapsulates the request parameters.)
This was one of the motivations for adding a view controller, which we talked about in the fall, and which I looked at doing for a little bit. A full-fledged view controller raised a lot of questions which made me inclined to wait for struts-chain, but a simple mechanism which boils down (for most users) to a method in Action or ActionMapping like "getOutputForm(String)" might be a nice compromise. Personally, if I could easily get an output form in an Action, I could live a while longer without a separate class to encapsulate my view stuff. The mechanism we use now is a horrible hack.
OK, I'm afraid I've already elaborated too much... Back to the specifics, I'm a little uneasy about the method to explicitly get a DynaActionForm. Otherwise, I think it's likely to be helpful, and likely to be a low-impact change.
Joe
--
Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "We want beef in dessert if we can get it there."
-- Betty Hogan, Director of New Product Development, National Cattlemen's Beef Association
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