Hi all!
The more I did into Struts the more I like it. I have noticed something that has me scratching my head a bit, wondered if anybody else had come up with a clean solution. Struts has a nice clean approach to organizing code and behaviour after you click on something. In other words, if I have a form then I have a nice way in Struts to associate the handler with the form. If I have a URL then there are decent ways that I can maintain the destinations in the controller instead of in the html/jsp pages. All nice. What I don't see is a straight-forward way of indicating what I want *before* going to a JSP page. Ok, I know... that probably sounds a little odd. My point is simply this: my JSP pages are maintainable because they, as view artifacts, don't know much about each other. If I want may action classes to be just as maintainable then they can't know much about each other either. That is the thing I don't like about actions at the moment. The action figures out how to process the incoming data from the request *and* prepare the page/session/whatever context before going to the next page. An action can only do that if it *knows* what the next page will require. That means there is less point in having that transition information explicitly captured in struts-config.xml because I might have to know the same information implicitly in the action code. So, here is what I want, and I'm hoping somebody has already found a clean approach for it. Instead of only writing "process-X" actions, I also want to write some "prepare-for-Y" actions. Then any JSP page has potentially two actions; one executed as I head into the page (e.g. to prep dynamic content), the other executed as I head out of the page (e.g. for user response). The clean way I can think of is to have some kind of action that iterates over the beans that will be needed by the next page, i.e.: - step 1, if I don't have a UserBean, get me a UserBean - step 2, if I don't have a UserPrefsBean, get me one (etc) Then, you'd need some way of getting a controller-mediated way of recognizing that some particular action must be invoked to get a UserBean, etc., and then returning control back to the "prep" action. Once the prep action has everything it needs, it forwards to the next step. Is this crazy? Sane but not done before? Sane and done already? Inquiring minds want to know! Thanks.... Reid --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online at Yahoo! Greetings.
