I wrote a class called DigestingPlugIn which was added to Struts after the 1.1 release which is designed to make it easy to put a menu like this into the application context so that it's always available to all your pages, even if they don't go through an action before display. Of course, if the choices are dynamic and specific to the request or the session, this doesn't work, but for things like sharing a menu of states or countries, it works pretty well. If you aren't comfortable using unreleased Struts code, you can get a library version of this class from http://demo.jgsullivan.com/struts/
Another alternative for request/session-specific options would be to extend the OptionsCollection tag to be smarter about how it gets the collection for iteration -- this would allow you to route people directly to the JSP without needing to go through an action class.
We've been having a vigorous discussion over the last couple of days about the best way to prefill form *values* in a pre-validation context, and to be honest, I feel like this is a use case which Struts doesn't address very well. It feels clumsy to fool around with creating an ActionForm and populating it "on the way" to the view; should I just get over that? Or is this something about Struts that deserves a closer look with an eye towards addressing the use case more directly? I've been meaning to search the archives to see what discussions have come up, but since I'm sending this message, I guess I'll just dump it out there and see what people think...
Joe
At 12:35 -0400 9/18/03, Mainguy, Mike wrote:
I also would like other's opinion on this. Right now, use a service locator style class to stuff all my lookup stuff into the request object manually. I have, however, used collections in the formbeans for this. I can't, off the top of my head, think of any significant advantages to using a form bean. One disadvantage, however, is you can only have 1 form bean per action, so lookups across multiple actions will need to have duplicate code.
-----Original Message----- From: Sgarlata Matt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 10:15 AM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: [repost] Special view information -> ActionForm or request?
Sorry for the repost. Has this already been discussed? I couldn't find it in the archives.
Original message:
Sometimes views need special information to display correctly, like a bean with the values needed to render a dropdown list. Is it considered a Struts best-practice to include this information in the ActionForm or should the Action which prepares this information store the information in the request instead?
Thanks,
Matt
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time." --Jaron Lanier
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