Re: AW: using multiple action forms in one action. Best practice?

[Bill Keese]

Hi Martin,
From this JSP I want to access a (hopefully) generic module to
get the access points. This "module" has to get some information (e. g. a
region to prefilter the addresses or access points already existing) from
JSP1.
I think you should  generate the input to the generic module, rather 
than passing the ActionForm directly:

  // get data from ActionForm1 needed to look up addresses
  AddressLookupInfo info = getAddressInfoFromActionForm1(AF1);
  // lookup addresses
  List res = AddressLookup.getAddresses(info);
   ...
Then your module can still be generic.
I could take the necessary information from AF1 to some POJO (or bean) on
model level (or controller level) and transfer it to AF2. This is 
probably
the "cleanest" solution but means to split each action into two, just 
to do
the data transfer.
 

You shouldn't need to split each action into two.  Action1's job is to 
handle the input from ActionForm1, and then do the setup to display 
JSP2, right?  So, just create the ActionForm2 manually inside Action1:

 // Create AF2 as an input/output form
 ActionForm2 af2 = new ActionForm2();
 session.setAttribute("actionForm2", af2);
 // ... and pre-populate it with the data the user has already input
 ActionForm1 af1 =
          (ActionForm1) getActionForm(mapping, form, request, session);
 af2.loadDataFromAF1(af1);
 // forward control to JSP2
 return (mapping.findForward("jsp2"));
My current solution simply accesses both action forms, AF1 and AF2 
(getting
the one not available as the "form"-parameter by MyForm mf = 
(MyForm)session.getAttribute("AFi");
but my feeling is that this is not really good style.
 

I guess it depends on whether you consider the two forms to represent 
one logical command or two logical commands.

The other thing to consider, though, is whether or not you want to store 
the ActionForms at session scope.   Session scope is problematic because 
you might end up accessing old data (if the user previously quit in the 
middle of a wizard).  Also, I imagine things would fail in a distributed 
application where the user's requests are randomly routed to multiple 
servers.    The alternative is to use request level scope, but in this 
case the information entered in Form#1 has to be embedded in the output 
of JSP2 as hidden HTML variables.

Bill
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