I've got a nice little STRUTS app working by sticking to the path set by the community examples and keeping my views gray and skeleton-like. I'm digging STRUTS, my form beans are not volatile through various wizard-style screens, so now I move on to fleshing things out by prettyfacing the JSPs and retrieving data from session beans for presentation by the view.
Assumption 1: Now that I need onChange and onClick events in the JSP tags, I need to rely on calling the submit() method of the form. This means I need to remove all of my <html:submit> because of the problem mentioned by others on this list with name="submit" and "submit method not supported by this object". Result: Good: the submit() method works and I can pass an action token either as a parameter of the request or as a hidden field via form bean property. Bad: My browser will not call the submit() method unless the URL of the request is *identical* to the URL of the source. So smile.jsp to smile.jsp works and I dispatch. faceSmile.do to smile.jsp or smile.jsp# fails because URLs differ and faceSmile.do or smile.jsp to faceFrown.do or frown.jsp fail. By *fail* I mean the submit() method *does not* call the perform() method of the smile action class (as verified through debugging console println). Assumption 2: I need to call the action class of every JSP page and always forward to the action class instead of linking (href) to the JSP. This is necessary to properly populate collections, retrieve data from the business tier, etc. without resorting to scriptlets in the JSP. For example, every JSP forwards to a global forward like forward="face.Smile" my face.Smile forward paths to faceSmile.do and my faceSmile.do maps to face.jsp which contains an <html:form> whose action="faceSmile" and which uses the faceFormBean. This also solves my first problem because every link forwards to its own action class (smile.jsp links forward to faceSmile.do which matches the source URL). Result: Good: Dispatching works, uses never see a jsp in the URL, my collections are populated in the action class and presented via the smile.jsp view. *Very Bad*: Every time I forward or call faceSmile.do, a new faceFormBean is instantiated, all properties are null (or default) and the methods in the action class attempting to get values from the faceFormBean get null. How do I control form bean recycling? What's going on? Does every call to a logical forward/action servlet generate a new request? I confirmed that the session id is constant. Someone developing 4 or 5 tier apps must with STRUTS in the view and controller must have run into this problem! Can you help? CONFIGURATIONS: Tomcat 4.0/Struts 1.0/JDK1.3.1_02/JAXP1.01 Tomcat 4.0/Struts 1.0.2/JDK1.3.1_02/JAXP1.01 IBM Visual Age for Java 4.0 Enterprise with JTE and JAXP 1.0.1 nicely configured per help provided by many in this community (took a while though!) Our target production environment is WebSphere 4 + Oracle 9i Respectfully, Paul Devalier _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
