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Jakarta Struts Cookbook
book

Jakarta Struts Cookbook

by Bill Siggelkow
February 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
528 pages
12h 53m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Jakarta Struts Cookbook

5.7. Automatically Creating ActionForms

Problem

You want to create a DynaActionForm (or subclass) automatically from your business objects without having to configure the form-bean and form-property elements ahead of time.

Solution

Use Hubert Rabago's Formdef plug-in. You can download formdef.jar from https://formdef.dev.java.net/ and copy it to your application's WEB-INF/lib directory. Formdef allows you to define form definitions in an XML file, as shown in Example 5-14.This file should be placed in the WEB-INF folder of your web application and given a meaningful name such as form-defs.xml.

Example 5-14. Formdef form definitions

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE form-definition PUBLIC "-//FormDef//FormDef Form Definition//EN" 
                                 "form-defs_0_5.dtd">
<form-definition>
    <formset>
        <form name="EmployeeForm"
          beanType="com.oreilly.strutsckbk.ch05.EmployeeFd"/>
    </formset>
</form-definition>

The form element maps a form named with the name element to a business object whose class is specified by the beanType attribute.

Next, add a plug-in element for Formdef to your struts-config.xml file:

<plug-in className="formdef.plugin.FormDefPlugIn">
    <set-property property="defnames"
                     value="/WEB-INF/form-defs.xml"/>
</plug-in>

The form named in the form element can be used in your application as if you had explicitly declared the form using a form-bean element in the struts-config.xml file. Here's an action that uses the EmployeeFdForm:

<action path="/SaveEmployeeFd" name="EmployeeFdForm" ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600771XSupplemental ContentErrata Page