Am Donnerstag, 8. Januar 2004 21:58 schrieb Patrice Sicaud: > Before I go half-cock about this, I was curious about the cleaner way > to preload a form. > For example, prior to authenticating users who forgot their user id, > I need to retrieve (from the database) the list of possible secret > questions that will be used to validate their responses (secret > answer). So... what do I do? provide an action without corresponding > presentation layer element? May be an FindForwardAction? Or is it > preferable to chain 2 actions. I have read somewhere that the latter > was not recommended. May be, it makes no difference??? > Any pointer would be appreciated...
I understand you need a rather static, global list which is to be read from the database before presenting the login form | authenticating the user. There are several approaches for this. 1. If your server supports Servlets 2.3, you can use a 'resource' listener which gets the list from the database and stores it as a Collection in Application scope. Then, you can populate your login form with the data from this Collection. Use this if your questions are rather 'fixed', as the listener will be reinitialized only if the application is reloaded. 2. An alternative solution would be to write a small custom Action which gets the list from the database, stores it in request scope and forwards to your login page. As the details of getting the list should be hidden from the Struts part, this typically more or less boils down to two lines of code (the Model call plus the one that stores the results) plus the forward to your login form. The advantage of this approach is that it's dynamic; if the number of question changes, the list will be up-to-date upon each new login attempt. The drawback is that an additional backend call is required for each login which can be a factor in situations of high traffic volume. We use both these approaches depending on the concrete scenario, and they both work well. Then, I doubt subclassing ActionServlet might be necessary or even recommendable here. > Thx > Patrice HTH, -- Chris. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
