I'm wondering if there is a "best practice" or standard Struts way of
handling repopulation of request attributes needed for a page after an
error.
For instance, I have a list of contacts with a checkbox next to each one.
The list is generated by the logic:iterate and multibox tags using a vector
that is placed in the request by the action that forwards to the page that
displays the list. The user can select contacts from the list and delete
them.
If the user clicks the delete button and there are no users checked, my
validate method throws them back to the page telling them that they need to
pick something. Of course, the vector is no longer in the request for
display, so you see the error message, but no users.
I did find a two things in past posts, but nothing really promising...
1)
repopulation occurs in the reset method
http://www.mail-archive.com/struts-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg05423.html
but this means that you are re-populating the request with the dropdown list
even if there aren't any errors, which seems like a waste of resources.
also, you still have to populate the first time from somewhere else as the
forms reset() method isn't called until after the first time the page is
displayed.
2)
repopulation occurs in validate method
http://www.mail-archive.com/struts-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg11305.html
this is what i'm looking at doing, but once again, i have to do it in two
places: the original action that generates the list in the jsp page and then
in the validate method of the form if there is an error.
I also have the additional problem of keeping track of which vector to
re-generate. I display the contacts in blocks of 25, so if you are on the
second block of 25 and you click delete with no contacts checked, I need to
know that I need to re-generate the second block and not the first.
I'm wondering if others have come up with a good way of handling this before
I go off and reinvent the wheel.
Thanks.
Tim
--------------------------------
Tim Trentham
Platform Development
@hand Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
