I was hoping I could get some opinions or critiques on an idea I had to make
ajax forms easier to manage. Obviously the easiest thing to do is have no
ajax specific handling at all, and send the entire response back to the
client which will then selectively update parts of the page through a
framework like JQuery. This however is a major bandwidth waste and sort of
defeates the purpose of ajax to begin with.
Traditionally I have had code in my action beans that determine if the
request was ajax, and I would respond accordingly with a smaller fragment
jsp. However this gets verbose when you are dealing with lots of different
types of ajax updates and the fragments need to work correctly with the
action bean. This is what I've been traditionally using. I haven't been a
fan of json responses because thats even more work on the client side to
repopulate the page. I like the simplicity of using jsps and the action
bean, and replacing content on the front end with JQuery.
However I was thinking of a different approach, which can still keep the
action bean in the dark about whether a request was ajax or not, and still
return a fragment page without all the work. What I envisioned was a generic
AjaxForwardResolution class, which first determines if the request was ajax
or not. If not, it returns the jsp just like the ForwardResolution would. If
it was an ajax request however, it would look for parameters passed in with
the form that contains the ids of elements that should be returned. It would
then strip those elements out of the full response and put them in a smaller
fragmented response.
So for example, a form might look like this:
<s:form>
<s:input type="hidden" name="ajaxResponse" value="messages" />
<s:input type="hidden" name="ajaxResponse" value="content" />
</s:form>
An action bean would look like this:
return new AjaxForwardResolution("/WEB-INF/jsp/someResponse.jsp")
And the response would look simply like this (for ajax requests)
<html>
<div id="messages">...</div>
<div id="content">...</div>
</html>
There is the question of performance now that the server needs to parse
these elements out of the response string. And it is wasteful that the other
parts of the page have been rendered unnecessarily. But this would make any
ajax call trivial if you have a generic client submit method to handle all
responses.
Any thoughts about this, or has anyone tried or worked on a different
approach?
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