Hello:
We are in the middle of our struts implementation, and
have run into a situation that we feel must have been
solved by someone already -- one of those "wow,
someone must have had this come up before" moments. :)
We have a search form that allows the user to populate
several fields, submit the form, and get some results.
This is a fairly trivial struts implementation-- we
have a (OrderSearchForm) and an OrderSearchAction that
handles the results. When the users clicks "submit" on
the form, all is well -- inputs are redisplayed, etc.
The rub comes in due to some hyperlinks we have on the
same page ( in the navigation bar ) that allows the
user to change languages. When these links are
clicked, we need to refresh the current page ( with
all the search results and form fields still
populated).
One solution would be to make the bean Session scoped,
but our functionality requirements will not allow that
because users that use the back button will get
confusing results. Specifically, if the user does a
search, then gets the results, then clicks the back
button, the Session scoped bean will contain the most
recent search parameters and the user would see the
old ones, so they'd <appear> to be getting the new
results in response to the old request criteria.
Disabling the back button by using transaction tokens
is out, because unfortunately our users _love_ the
back button :(
To make our site friendlier for back button use, we'd
like to persist the state of the form onto these
hyperlinks, so that we dont have the session back
button problems. We read the struts docs and archives,
and at this point the best we can come up with would
be to have a formbean method like this:
public class OrderForm extends ActionForm{
public String getOrderNumber()
public void setOrderNumber( String onumber)
public String getSearchStatus()
public void setSearchStatus( String status )
Map getUrlParameters(){ ... }
}
the extra getUrlParameters() method could be used by
<html:link> to add the pararmeters necessary to
persist the form data.
What bothers us about this approach is that we are
essentially re-inventing the logic used to map a
ActionForm into request parameters. This is fairly
trivial for single beans, but certainly non-trivial
for indexed properites, mapped properties, and nested
beans.
We'd like to be able to use the same action
("OrderSearchAction" ) to process the request coming
from a link as we do for the OrderSearch form. This
means that the <html:link> will need to have the same
parameter names that struts uses when the <html:input>
and <html:form> tags are used.
We couldnt help but think that there should be some
way to build a hyperlink that will add all of the url
parameters for a form onto the url string using
parameter naming scheme that is identical to that used
by <html:form>.
For example, if I have this form bean:
public class OrderForm extends ActionForm{
public String getOrderNumber()
public void setOrderNumber( String onumber)
public String getSearchStatus()
public void setSearchStatus( String status )
}
And this action configuration:
<action path="/ordersearchaction"
type="com.mycorp.OrderSearchAction"
name="orderform"
scope="request"
validate="true"
<forward name="pricingEntry"
path="/WEB-INF/jsp/pricingEntry.jsp"/>
</action>
I'd like something like this:
<html:link action="ordersearchaction"
bean="mybean">Click here</html:link>
to create this href:
<a
href="/do/ordersearchaction&ordernumber=123454&searchstatus=open">Click
here</a>
Are we totally off-base here? Is there a simpler
solution we are missing? Comments are appreciated!
We're expecting that there's an easy way to do this,
but if there isnt and this seems valuable, we'd be
happy to contribute an implementation to the group!
Regards
Dave
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