I'm trying to make the back-end of my Struts webapp more flexible, and I'm interested in the mechanism by which a dynamic form is created. I'm currently using the DAO pattern, so I have a ton of Data Transport Objects. I've just hit a file with 129 data fields and I'm just not excited about writing (or even using a code generator to produce) all those get/set methods. Twice, because there will be an interface and an implementation.
The database behind the DAO layer is multivalued. I'm not using a JDBC driver, so none of the existing magic will work. The next version (UniData 6.0) is supposed to speak XML, so I think I could produce something like the <form-bean><form-property> structure from the data dictionary. Given that, some sort of XML file describing the data fields, what do I look at to transform that into a class that conforms to the JavaBeans spec? It would need to work with JSTL as I often have a DTO sitting in the session that I use JSTL to display pieces of. I've looked around in the code but I've only found the actual DynaWhatever classes, not the bits that read the XML and create the objects. Where is that hiding? And if anyone could give a high level overview of what actually happens, that would help. Thanks! (Not technically Struts related, I know... please reply privately.) -- Wendy Smoak Applications Systems Analyst, Sr. Arizona State University PA Information Resources Management
