This hopefully is a simple question that has been dealt with

[Rick Reumann <ma...@reumann.net>]

Sorry to post this question again, but I'm still curious about this
...

I'm sure this question has come up but I'm not having much luck
searching the archives. I'm really new to Struts so I hope this
question isn't too out of place for this list. Lets say we are dealing
with Employee beans. I would my EmployeeBean to be able to have
members that are not all Strings. (In this example say Age would be an
int, birthDate a java.util.Date, etc.). Now in the sample app I'm
developing I have an EmployeeForm class also that currently has just
String datatypes for these fields. Having the information from the
actual form jsp's going to the EmployeeForm in as all Strings without
any conversions is not that big of a deal since wherever I do anything
with this data (jdbc inserts in the business logic I could always
covert them there if I need to ). However, I'm more concerned with
getting this information displayed correctly using the iterate tag.
For example, say I have on an Action class that gets back and
ArrayList of EmployeeBean objects and puts this list into the request
before forwarding. I really can't do:

<logic:iterate id="row" name="employeeList">
    <bean:write name="row" property="firstName"/><BR>
    <bean:write name="row" property="lastName"/><BR>
    <bean:write name="row" property="age"/><BR>
    <bean:write name="row" property="birthDate"/><BR>
    <BR>
</logic:iterate>

since I won't have birthDate formatted correctly, or say I was
returning a Double that I needed in a currency format. What is the
best way to deal with this situation? I could of course maybe have my
business logic return me a Collection of EmployeeForm beans instead
and inside the EmployeeForm beans there would be methods like
setBirthDateDate( Date date ) that would take a java.util.Date and
format it into a String and then call the EmployeeForm setBrithDate(
String date ). Although that would work, I'd still rather deal with
the business logic that returns a Collection of EmployeeBeans... as
this seems to make the most reusable sense (maybe the components later
won't just be for the web).

Thanks for any help.


--

Rick

mailto:maillist@reumann.net

"Why do people in ship mutinies always ask for 'better treatment'? I'd
ask for a pinball machine, because with all that rocking back and
forth you'd probably be able to get a lot of free games."
  -Jack Handey


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