[newbie] Passing an object to an actionBean within an html:form

[Laurent Leconte <la...@es.wanadoo.com>]

Hello all,

I'd like to pass a complex object (i.e. not a String or something easily convertible to a String) to an actionForm, within an <html:form> tag.

Specifically, my jsp displays a list of BaseTable objects. I'd like to create an <html:form> for each object, so that clicking on the "submit" button passes the given object to my actionForm and calls the appropriate action. To make this clearer :

The <html:form> I'd *like* to have :

<html:form action="/detail.do">
	<html:hidden property="element" value="<%=(BaseTable) element%>" />
	<html:submit>			
</html:form>

----------
My actionForm :

package com.wanadoo.es.dispatcher.forms;

//snip imports
import com.wanadoo.es.dispatcher.datastruct.BaseTable;

public class GetDetailForm extends ActionForm {
	
	private BaseTable element;
	//more...

	//snip setters and getters

---------
The relevant struts-config.xml lines:

<form-bean name="detailForm" type="com.wanadoo.es.dispatcher.forms.GetDetailForm"/>

<action
	path="/detail"
      type="com.wanadoo.es.dispatcher.actions.GetDetailAction"
      name="detailForm"
      scope="request"
      validate="false">
      <forward name="Success" path="/detail.jsp"/>
</action>

The problem is that the <html:hidden> tags will only set String properties, and the BaseTable object is too complex to be turned into a String and back.

I thought of making the actionForm bean available to the entire page, loading the entire List of BaseTables into it statically, and only passing a String identifier (such as the position of the object in the list, for instance) dynamically. However, this would make for significant overhead (some lists have 500+ elements) and is doesn't seem very elegant.

Any ideas ?

--
Laurent Leconte
lleconte@es.wanadoo.com


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