> Glass houses, stones, and all, but I think it's a yicky solution, far > too dependent on nothing ever changing :) If I were doing it I'd explore > other options (storing user prefs in a db indexed by a cookie value, for > instance) and work off of that. Having position-dependent values seems > an invitation to fragility.
I'm currently storing preferences in a database, but I wanted to move to cookies to avoid the overhead of the database connection. This isn't life or death-- just a convenience to remember what they were looking at last time they used the same computer and browser. > If you're dead-set on positional keys, maybe just using an integer and > doing bit compares (I don't know how/if that works under JSTL, but it's > a trivial custom tag) or something... Or just use a custom tag for the > YNYNYYNN method, I suppose. Obviously the db (or similar) solution is > more robust and mutable. I'm not dead set on positional keys; that's just what came to mind to store as the cookie. In the Struts action, before it goes to the JSP, I can turn that cookie into anything-- a Map? An array of booleans?? What would be easy to deal with in either JSTL or Struts tags? That's what I came here to ask, really. I don't think reading the cookie with JSTL is the best solution necesarily, I just wondered if it was possible. Thanks! -- Wendy Smoak Applications Systems Analyst, Sr. Arizona State University PA Information Resources Management
