Collection-backed form properties solution

[harish krishnaswamy <wh...@yahoo.com>]

After spending quite sometime on the collection-backed
form properties solution, I figured its worth
mentioning the solution I dug out. I have to say that
the documentation on this one is pretty sparse. Ok
here we go...

I have a jsp that needs to accept an order for items.
This jsp has single-occurence fields like customer
name and address and multi-occurence fields like item
id, item name and item price. The later is the focus
of this message. I have created a plain java bean for
the multi-occurence fileds called ItemBean.

public class ItemBean {
  public ItemBean() {
  }
  public void setId(int id) {
    this.id = id;
  }
  public int getId() {
    return this.itemId;
  }
  public void setName(String name) {
    this.name = name;
  }
  public String getName() {
    return this.name;
  }
  public void setPrice(double price) {
    this.price = price;
  }
  public double getPrice() {
    return this.price;
  }
}

I have created a DynaActionForm bean as follows:

<form-bean name="orderForm" dynamic="true"   
  type="org.apache.struts.action.DynaActionForm">
  <form-property name="name" type="java.lang.String"/>
  <form-property name="address" 
    type="java.lang.String"/>
  <form-property name="itemBeans" 
    type="java.util.ArrayList"/>
  <form-property name="event"
type="java.lang.String"/>
</form-bean>

And I have a jsp like shown below:

<html:form action="view2Submit.do">

Name: <html:text property="name"/>&nbsp;
Address: <html:text property="address"/>

<table>

<tr>
	<td>Id:</td>
	<td>Name:</td>
	<td>Price:</td>
</tr>

<logic:iterate id="itemBeans" indexId="idx" 
  name="orderForm" property="itemBeans" 
  type="com.xyz.ItemBean">

<tr>
<td><html:text name="itemBeans" property="id" 
  indexed="true"/></td>
<td><html:text name="itemBeans" property="name" 
  size="50" indexed="true"/></td>
<td><html:text name="itemBeans" property="price" 
  indexed="true"/></td>
</tr>

</logic:iterate>

<tr>
<td><html:submit value="Save" 
  onclick="setSubmitEvent('saveActivity');"/>
</td>
<td><html:submit value="Add" 
  onclick="setSubmitEvent('addActivityProperty');"/>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<html:hidden property="event"/>

</html:form>

Notice that the values of "id" and "property"
attributes of the <logic:iterate> tag are the same.
This is what makes the name of the html text fields to
evaluate to the right format, which is:
itemBeans[n].id for the id field. This "itemBeans" is
the name of the indexed-property in the form bean. The
"event" field is used by DispatchAction.

Hope this was helpful to atleast someone.

-Harish

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