I'm not sure what your proposing is bad per se... let's ask it this way:
how else could you accomplish this without manually instantiating the
form, because I agree, that's the one part that doesn't smell great to
me either.

One way to do it would be that the forward returned from Page1Action
specifies not a JSP directly, but instead some "setup" action mapping
for page2. It would have the session-scoped form mapping, so Struts
would create it if necessary, and the action could then do the necessary
populating that page2.jsp requires.

That's probably a somewhat cleaner approach, but it has the down side of
invoking the whole request processing cycle again, so there is an
overhead involved. Bit of a trade-off.

FYI, just for another opinion, I don't like the idea of using business
objects directly in the view. To me, an ActionForm has a very
well-defined job: it is a DTO between the view and the control layer.
It should deal with string only, since that's what you get with HTTP,
type conversions should be handled downstream. I DO think it should be
used for both input and output. I realize this leads to more code, more
classes, but I think the original point of ActionForm was a good
decision, to me it doesn't feel right that so many people are in favor
of moving away from that (I'm not even sure I like the combined
Action/ActionForm you get in S2... I'm still mulling that one over in my
warped little mind). It's just my opinion though.

Frank

Chaudhary, Harsh wrote:
> I am not doing things this way. I presented this as a hypothetical case
> and my question is why is this bad? I mean what problems can we run into
> using this technique.
>
> Thanks for the write up but I would appreciate something that in more in
> detail.
>
> Thanks,
> Harsh.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Jouravlev [mailto:jmikus@(protected)]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 3:32 PM
> To: Struts Users Mailing List
> Subject: Re: Struts session scoped forms
>
>
> On 2/28/07, Chaudhary, Harsh <HCHAUDHA@(protected):
>> I have page1.jsp which has a form which calls Page1Action which
> forwards
>> to page2.jsp. Also, session scoped Page1Form and Page2Form.
>>
>> In Page1Action, I do:
>>
>> Page2Form frm = new Page2Form();
>> frm.setSomeVariable("Some Value");
>>
>> Then read this value in page2.jsp to display.
>>
>> I feel the bad part is initializing the Page2Form myself. This works
>> correctly because I think Struts checks for the form being available
> in
>> all scopes, finds it in session, and just uses that instead of
> creating
>> a new one in the Page2Form constructor.
>>
>> Is this way of doing things correct? If not why? Or am I zoned out too
>> much to make sense?
>
> This is okay. Not great to my taste, but okay. You should use the same
> key as "name" attribute in the action mapping. I would recommend you
> another pattern, but I will not going to share my way of doing this
> until a new version of Struts1 that would allow to turn off automatic
> reset/populate of a form is released.
>
> Why would you create an ActionForm for pure output purposes? You can
> create a POJO or even access properties of your business object.
>
> On a side note, in Struts actions precede pages. An action receives a
> request and then displays a page. In your case, it obtains information
> from page1, but it renders page2. Even this is not true. An action
> does not obtain information from a page, it just receives a request
> and it does not care where the request comes from. So talking in terms
> "page1.jsp calls Page1Action" is not entirely correct to me. Therefore
> I would name your action as Page2Action, not Page1Action, that would
> be clearer for me.
>
> Michael.
>
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--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
AIM/Yahoo: fzammetti
MSN: fzammetti@(protected)
Author of "Practical Ajax Projects With Java Technology"
(2006, Apress, ISBN 1-59059-695-1)
Java Web Parts - http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net
Supplying the wheel, so you don't have to reinvent it!

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