I made use of Digester the first time yesterday. I was amazed at how easy and convienient it is to use - only took an hour to learn enough to use it for what I wanted. (Reading some config data and creating objects from it) Very cool :-) I Like!
-----Original Message----- From: Joe Germuska [mailto:Joe@;Germuska.com] Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 01:18 To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Re: Struts & XML Of course, the suggestions to check out STXX or the JSTL to use XSLT to style your XML are perfectly good... and maybe that's why you decided to change your subroutine to return XML... but if you want to get things back into familiar object-land, you could pass the XML to some routine which could produce a java Object for you from the XML. Then you could use the object in Struts in all the usual ways. There are whole frameworks for this (Betwixt, Zeus, Castor, others) but if you only need to consume the XML and never need to write it out in the same fashion from the object, you might want to check out Jakarta Commons Digester (which is how Struts reads in all of its configuration files.) Once I learned how to use Digester, I never again had a moment's pause over the question of whether it was "too much trouble" to use an XML file to externalize some data -- it's really easy to use, especially if you have the liberty of designing your own XML format, in which case you can make things even easier. Basically, you can assign an element name to an object and use attributes of that element named exactly as the properties of that object, and you can get Digester to construct and populate a bean for you in about three lines of code. See http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/digester/api/ for details; there isn't a lot more documentation, but the Javadoc is pretty complete. One thing to note is that digesters aren't designed to be threadsafe; if you are using digester in a servlet environment, you should keep in mind the same considerations as when writing servlets. Joe At 9:17 AM -0700 2002/10/23, Wendy Smoak wrote: >Currently I'm calling a database subroutine (in an Action) that returns a >list of keys, and then using a DAO in a loop to build up a List of Java >objects that contain the data I need to display. That List gets put in >session scope and then it's off to the resolution.jsp to display it with a ><logic:iterate> tag. > >*IF* I changed the database subroutine to return XML, what would I do with >it? I'd have something like this coming back: > ><content> > <person> > <name>John Smith</name> > <birthdate>05/25/1965</birthdate> > <status>PP</status> > <address> > 123 State Street > City, ST, 12345 > </address> > <source>ALUM</source> > <reunion_class>ML1999</reunion_class> > <reunion_class>ME2002</reunion_class> > </person ></content> > >(I'm unclear on how to format the address which has multiple lines.) > >Anyway, would I put that String in session scope? And then... I'm just >reading about XSLT now. Can someone point me in the general direction of >which Struts (or other) taglibs I might need? I'm on Tomcat 4.1.12 & a >recent Struts nightly build with the -el tags. > >Thanks in advance, > >-- >Wendy Smoak >http://sourceforge.net/projects/unidbtags -- -- * Joe Germuska { [EMAIL PROTECTED] } "It's pitiful, sometimes, if they've got it bad. Their eyes get glazed, they go white, their hands tremble.... As I watch them I often feel that a dope peddler is a gentleman compared with the man who sells records." --Sam Goody, 1956 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
