Bug 10936 and initialization

[James Turner <tu...@blackbear.com>]

Hi all,
    I'd like to discuss this issue some more.  A while back, I submitted a 
request to allow an array of arbitrary type to be instantiated in a 
DynaForm.  Craig responded that you could do this by using an initial= 
clause of the appropriate length and registering a converter.

    Unfortunately, to the best of my abilities, I haven't been able to get 
that approach to work, because it doesn't look like DynaForms call the 
converter.  Instead they use DynaActionForm.set, which only works for a 
limited set of types.

    More to the point, I consider this a kind of occam's razor type of 
thing.  In most cases, if I'm creating an array of objects for a form, 
they're a custom class I've written that has placeholders for rows of 
data.  For example, in my current application, I have dependents for an 
insurance subscriber.  The form looks like:

L_NAME   F_NAME   M_INIT  GENDER   DOB   RELATIONSHIP

So I have an object called Dependent, with properties lastName, firstName, etc.

Now I want to declare a DynaForm with 10 of this objects.  Remember, I 
don't need to initialize the objects to anything, they can be created by 
calling the generic instantiator for the class.

So which is simpler:

<form-property name="dependents" type="com.mystuff.Dependents[]" size=10/>

or

<form-property name="dependents" type="com.mystuff.Dependents[]"
    initial={'','','','','','','','','',''}/>  AND writing a converter and 
putting in an initialization routine somewhere in my code to register the 
converter.

James



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