I was actually thinking of doing it declaratively, i.e., for each Action mapping you could specify a list of setup methods to call, and Struts would go ahead and do that right before it called your Action's execute(). I figured you'd specify the class and method to call, although even easier would be to write an actual SetupAction class, or something along those lines, with a known interface that all these classes would have to implement, then you would just specify the class and Struts would know what method to call. But, that would probably mean only one setup method per setup class, and I'm not sure that would be optimal.
I'm kind of babbling here :), but the basic idea I do like.
Did you post your StrutsState proposal anywhere? I'd be interested in seeing it. I wonder if we were thinking along the same lines?
Then again, I know *someone* is going to point out that Shale (or I guess JSF generically?) already has this notion ingrained in it. That might well be true, and I know neither of us are the first people to mention such an idea (I've seen mention of this before numerous times), but I for one think such a thing added to "classic" Struts would be very nice indeed.
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Dakota Jack wrote:
I think this solution is "the bomb". I once suggested a generic solution like this for Struts called StrutsState. No one was much interested, so I just built it for my own work. It is so helpful that I cannot express my gratitude toward myself to myself. ///;-)
On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 14:27:08 -0500, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Someone else made some good suggestions about listeners and plugins. These will work well if the dropdown contents are truly static.
If however it might be the kind of values that you want to make sure are up-to-date, i.e., read from a database maybe...
Then one simple solution is create yourself a class that is basically independant from your application that is used for setup for a paricular screen or set of screens. Create a static method for the setup, then from any Action associated with a page that needs that data, just call that static method at the start of the Action. Simple, one line of code per Action and one import (or none, if it's in the same package).
I would create static members of the setup class for the attribute names, and make the static setup method(s) return something like an ArrayList (or whatever type you need), so that you can call it from your Actions with something like:
request.setAttribute(MySetupClass.MY_ATTRIBUTE_NAME, MySetupClass.doSetup());
That way you aren't tied to it being a webapp, should you need to do a different presentation layer later.
I think this is a decent, simple approach to this type of thing.
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Ben Taylor wrote:
Hi,
Can anyone tell me if there is an easy way to put information (required to populate drop down boxes using data from a db) in to the request, without having to write a setup Action for each page as is done here: http://www.reumann.net/struts/lesson2/step9.do .
Thank you for any help!
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