Thanks a lot for all your input and help. It looks like I need some
basic concepts clarified. Here a very short background of the
application and what my intension is:
The object 'subscriber' is a special business object: it represents the
logged in user and contains a lot of information about him: Personal
data like name, address, e-mail, preferred language etc. But it contains
also information about his roles, type of subsciption he bought etc.
Shortly I need parts of this information almost everywhere in the
application and thats why the thing sits in session scope.
The action we were discussing 'changePersonalDataForm' represents a form
where the user can change some of this informations such as personal
data, language etc. Other things such as roles, subscibtion information
etc are not visible to the user. The object has logic to retrieve its
information from various database tables and also store information back
if there are changes. This is performed exclusively in this object not
in any action. The object is created and filled when the user has
successfully logged in.
So I used
<html:text value="${sessionScope.subscriber.firstname}"
property="firstname" name="firstname" maxlength="64"
size="32"/>
to initially fill the firstname directly from the business object into
the form. If the user submits the form the information is updated in the
object and also written back to the DB server. Nice things like
ChangeEventListeners as available in Swing and also in JSF are sort of
missing in Struts (at least I did not find something alike)
So the key question seems to be:
What is the correct or preferred way to link business-objects with form
beans. Is this only possible by copying data from a business object to a
form bean or is there any 'smarter' way? Copying ends up in writing a
lot of copy-code which is inefficient. I am looking for sort of a
component model, which means I have a couple of objects in session or
even application scope and can directly use then in many different
forms/actions. But so far I am missing a concept like SWING controls do
have it where you can bind controls such as a listbox, textbox etc
directly to objects or even database tables. I think JSF offers similar
things but I don't see anything alike in struts 1.2.8 (the version I am
currently using).
Maybe someone could clarify these things for me or you may have some
good recipes for me, how to solve these things best with Struts.
Many thanks again for your help!
Tom
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