Direct the user to an action that isn't the action associated with the page in question, even if all that action does is forward to the JSP page. Generally the action's associated with a JSP page get called from that JSP page.
ActionA forwards to B.JSP, B.JSP submits to ActionB and so on... Alternately provide a hidden form variable in your page, in your validation method, check for it, if it's not there, don't continue validating as the user did not just submit the page. Robert Nocera New England Open Solutions www.neosllc.com "You supply the vision, we'll do the rest." -----Original Message----- From: Sid Stuart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 12:25 PM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Design question about ActionForm's validate method Hi, I've stumbled across a subtle problem/design question that I don't see mentioned in the documentation. The ActionForm's validate method can be configured to verify form data from a page and generate error messages which may then be displayed on the page for the user to see. This works fine when the user has accessed the page by specifying a JSP file in the URL. When the user accesses the page by calling the Action directly though, the validate method is called before the user ever sees the page, much less inputs valid data to the form. This leads to an unfortunate display of unwarranted error messages. It would be nice if the documentation would provide a rule such as: If one plans on the user calling the Action directly in the URL then one should not use the automatic validation provided by ActionForm. Further, as having two different procedures to generate a page can lead to subtle errors, one should decide whether a page will be accessed as a JSP or as an Action and design for the one scenario. The simplest (and safest) design rule will be to access all pages through either one mechanism or the other. Comments? Sid Stuart -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
