Jakarta Struts Cookbook

5.6. Populating Value Objects from ActionForms

Problem

You don't want to have to write numerous getters and setters to pass data from your action forms to your business objects.

Solution

Use the introspection utilities provided by the Jakarta Commons BeanUtils package in your Action.execute( ) method:

               import org.apache.commons.beanutils.*;

// other imports omitted

  public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping,
      ActionForm form,
      HttpServletRequest request,
      HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {

    BusinessBean businessBean = new BusinessBean( );
    BeanUtils.copyProperties(businessBean, form);

    // ... rest of the Action

Discussion

A significant portion of the development effort for a web application is spent moving data to and from the different system tiers. Along the way, the data may be transformed in one way or another, yet many of these transformations are required because the tier to which the data is moving requires the information to be represented in a different way.

Data sent in the HTTP request is represented as simple text. For some data types, the value can be represented as a String object throughout the application. However, many data types should be represented in a different format in the business layer than on the view. Date fields provide the classic example. A date field is retrieved from a form's input field as a String. Then it must be converted to a java.util.Date in the model. Furthermore, when the value is persisted, it's usually transformed again, this ...