Multiboxes in Wizard Forms

[Jaye Bass <ja...@knology.net>]

I solved a problem that I'd been having with multiboxes and wanted to present 
it to the list for a sanity check.

Specifically, I had a 3 page wizard that essentially edited an existing model 
bean. I'm using a single form bean across the three pages. The third page of 
the wizard had a multi-box that is prepopulated by model. The original 
problem was a common one, namely when I deselected every box I was not 
getting the behaviour that I was expecting. I read a bit and implemented 
reset(). This introduced a new problem...my multi-box came up empty. Since 
the multi-box is backed by a String array, I first tried to send a hidden 
property through the pages until I needed it in the last page. That didn't 
work. Finally I came up with a duplicate property let's call it:

form.get(set)HiddenMultiBoxProperty();

when the form was loaded with the data to be edited I loaded this "hidden" 
property with the initial values for the multi-box (but the member field 
backing this property was not included in the reset()). In the action that 
eventually presented the multi-box, I loaded the "real" multi-box property 
with the array stored in my "hidden" property. This strategy gave me the 
behaviour I was looking for...namely, the multi-box was initialized with the 
proper values AND I could detect that all the values were deselected when the 
page containing the multi-box was submitted.

IMO, this seems to be a general solution to this type of problem.

Any comments, suggestions?

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