It's was just a suggestion. I've been bitten in the past when I wasn't consistant in my design or I didn't follow patterns. Mostly with maintenance. It's made me more of a purist when it comes to patterns.
To clarify, the Action doesn't build the byte[] array. It would retrieve it from a utility class or business component. It's job is to place it in request scope and forward to the Servlet. It's a great idea to move Nick's code to a utility class. Putting that code in an Action certainly would be a bad idea. Action classes are controllers and shouldn't directly handle business logic or building a response to the client. This would directly couple your application logic to the Stuts framework. (Last couple sentences meant for newbies reading this thread). -- Virtually, Andre Van Klaveren Architect III, SCP Enterprise Transformation Services Unisys Corporation On 4/27/05, Brian McGovern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well i guess thats technically correct but arguably if my action is > delegating control flow by validating the user is who he says he is before > showing the pdf to him. He can be bounced to 3 other screens via this action > class and I don't see much difference in using the action to stream back > response or creating a byte[] or refernce to the File and storing in request > scope. > > Ive achieved reuse by dumping a modified version of Nick's handy method in a > utility class that I'll be reusing on other projects. > So while i agree with you on principle, i think this might be one of those > cases where in practice its a better idea to stray from stringent mvc pattern. > > But I'm just a hack. :) > -B > > -----Original Message----- > From: Andre Van Klaveren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 4:51 PM > To: Struts Users Mailing List; Nick Heudecker > Subject: Re: PDF Streamed To Client > > Brian, > > While Nick's solution certainly works, it doesn't follow best > practices, MVC in particular (No offense Nick). Technically a view > component such as a Servlet or JSP should be responsible for writing > the response back to the client. The Action is responsible for flow > control and interacting with business components. > > I solved a similar problem by having the Action place a byte array of > the PDF content and the content type (as a String) in request scope > and forwarding to a Servlet. The Servlet's (called > BinaryOutputServlet) sole purpose is to retrieve the content and > content type from request scope and stream it back to the client. > This is where Nick's example code would fit nicely. > > Now, in your case you would probably put a reference to the PDF file > in request scope instead of a byte array, especially if the PDF > documents are large. In my case the content was relatively small and > was generated dynamically. > > If you design the Servlet generically it can be reused in any project > that requires the application to stream the content of any type of > file to the client (gif, jpg, rdf, etc). > > -- > Virtually, > Andre Van Klaveren > SCP > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
