The main reason I'm not ready to use displaytag is because I need to generate reports for more than just HTML output; my users will have the choice to get a delimited file as well, or instead of HTML, and they'll have the option to get the report mailed to them as well as generated while-they-wait. I know that displaytag has some support for export files, but I'm figuring it's more work than it's worth to use a JSP tag library for asynchronous generation of a CSV file sent as an email attachment.
My design is to have a model-level report returned from a report service to a controller which can then send the report to various renderers. I just haven't yet written classes to deal with common report functions like grouping and totalling, and it seems like something that would be generally useful.
I think displaytag is pretty impressive, and totally appropriate for a model where the web page is the primary output form. I actually find the decorator model a little frustrating, as it requires writing and compiling code for view things which I'd prefer to have more flexibly changeable in a JSP (at least it did a year ago when I used it last) -- I'm pretty sure I had to compile a date format into a column decorator; what happens when the client decides they want that to change? I have to recompile the class? Or find someplace other than displaytag to set a runtime property for the date format; that seems awkward.
I think instead of a single "table" tag, it would be nice to have a "table" tag which defined beans and made them available to nested tags for various purposes, like many Struts tags do (html:messages, logic:iterate, etc). This might be hard to do and still achieve everything that displaytag does, but if I were really motivated, I'd look at adapting displaytag to a model more like that...
Joe
At 22:59 -0400 9/19/03, David G Friedman wrote:
Joe,
I've been planning on using the displaytag library for that stuff when I get to it next week. Why won't the decorator classes work for you to perform summations of rows, groups, and so forth? I'm wondering why it won't work for you in case the same reasons might apply to my application....
For reference, an example of the decorators for summations of groups and rows is here: http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/example-callbacks.jsp
With their Java decorator class code example code here: http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-examples/TotalWrapper.java.txt
--
--
Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time." --Jaron Lanier
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
