Hmm I didn't catch that nuance... thanks for pointing that out, it does
indeed change the picture.
In any case, I finally got my own application to work as intended --
using one JSP page, one ActionForm, and one Action --
1. The JSP page's initial invocation notices that there is no ActionForm
bean present, so it forwards to user to the Action (with no parameters).
2. The Action (which is configured with "validate=false") notices that
the ActionForm supplied is EMPTY (note that it's not NULL), and fills it
with the editable data, then forwards the user back to the JSP page.
3. The JSP page displays the form in HTML format, and changes are
submitted back to the Action again.
4. The Action notices that we have a "full form" now, so it MANUALLY
calls the ActionForm's "validate()" method. Then, assuming there are no
ActionErrors, it saves the data to disk.
Would appreciate comments from the group on whether this is a reasonable
design use of Struts.
Thanks,
Bryan
P.S. To Biju Isac -- I do not think that Struts is wrong from every
angle; in fact I'm wrapping up a three-month project based upon it, and
in reflecting on the experience there's a lot to like about Struts. On
the other hand, I do think that the documentation needs a lot of beefing
up. I will also share my feelings that the tag library, in particular,
is confusingly designed. For example, many of the [logic] tags seem to
have too many permuations of behavior depending upon the parameters
supplied. I'm just not convinced that such deeply intertwined,
"overloaded" behavior (for lack of a better description) is the best
design. It certainly makes it hard to wade through the docs and grasp
(and memorize) how they work.
Jean-Noel Ribette wrote:
>
> registration.jsp does display the populated form, but when the form is submited, it
>is to SaveRegistrationAction, not
> EditRegistrationAction.
>
> Jean-Noel
>
>
>