>From your description, it sounds like there could be an ancestor
ActionForm common to the Order and Maintenance wizards. If that were the
case, each could subclass that ActionForm, and the Corporate Info Action
would then refer to the ancestor class, common to both wizards.
In general, an Action does not need to be tightly coupled to a
particular ActionForm. In fact, the coupling is rather loose. The Action
itself is passed a reference to an ActionForm. Which ActionForm class is
passed depends on the ActionMapping. There ~is~ a tight coupling between
an ActionMapping and an ActionForm class, but the Actions themselves can
be reused -- though some clever typecasting may be needed if more than
one ActionForm class is accessed.
It's important to remember that an Action can be used by any number
of different ActionMappings. Whether or not they use the same ActionForm
is up to the developer. The framework's design allows you to use a
a different Action for each ActionForm, or a single Action for the
entire
application, or anything in between. (Praise be to Craig;-)
-- Ted Husted, Husted dot Com, Fairport NY USA.
-- Custom Software ~ Technical Services.
-- Tel 716 737-3463.
-- http://www.husted.com/about/struts/
Stephen LeClair wrote:
> One of the minor Order screens is the Corporate Info screen (mainly
> address info)- it is designed to be a popup screen that can be called
> from within the Order wizard or the Account Maintenance wizard. However,
> it isn't implemented as an independent Action/Form because we don't know
> how to make the Order Form AND the Account Mntc Form both reuse the
> Corporate Info Form/Action. Specifically, we don't know how to implement
> such that the Action class for Corporate Info can be reused by both the
> Order and Account wizards. So, today the same fields are duplicated in
> the two wizards and all the code is duplicated (ugly!).
>
> We can envision a wrapper form that contains other forms and uses a dot
> notation in the JSPs to reference properties
> (orderForm.corporateInfoForm.address) but how do the Action classes for
> CorporateInfo get reused? There seems to be such tight coupling between
> an ActionForm and an Action Class that I don't know how to achieve
> reuse. I played with creating an IAddress Action interface that both the
> Order and Account wizards could implement but got caught up in the
> coupling issues.
