Re: HTML formatting of newline characters with bean:write tag

[Erik Hatcher]

I sort of take the philosophy of "wrapping" (or perhaps "shielding") my applications from the underlying framework I'm using in order to allow later customizations or tweaks. For example, its pretty much a Struts best practice to subclass your own BaseForm and BaseAction (these are the names I use) rather than Struts ActionForm and Action. It comes in very handy. In our last application BaseForm originally extended from ActionForm, but later we applied Validator and extended it from ValidatorForm instead (and override validation, called super, made it final so subclasses couldn't screw with the validations inadvertently).

Same approach for taglibs. I created a <custom:label> tag that borrowed a little code from <bean:message> but did other things like change the style if the field known by the key was in error and put an asterisk there if the field was required by Validator. I have not needed this for <bean:write> but perhaps the same technique of shadowing/wrapping/shielding your app with a <custom:write> tag but steal the code from <bean:write> to do what you want that it doesn't currently do. In our environment, we could easily create a <bean:write> replacement and apply it globally across all pages with an IntelliJ find/replace in path and be done with it :)

Erik


Ted Husted wrote:

IMHO, once we opened the door past the filter attribute, people would suggest that we start adding this or that to the bean write tag as well.
I would say that any transformations beyond the escape filter really belong on some other tag.
IMHO, a better place for a tag like this is Taglibs. This functionality does not involve the core framework directly, and the effort may get more exposure in taglibs than here.
Also, IMHO, we should encourage people to look to Taglibs for general-purpose tags. Post 1.1, we might seriously consider migrating the bean, logic, tile, and template packages to Taglibs (if they will have them), where it can stand toe-to-
toe with JSTL.

This would let us focus on the HTML tags that interact with the framework, and leave the generic functionality to the (other) Jakarta community that specializes in such things.

But if someone supplies the patch, and a Committer applies it, like Craig, I'm +0 on the deal.

-Ted.

10/24/2002 5:12:19 AM, Inge Solvoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I actually didn't think of creating a tag that

can be wrapped around the

bean:write tag, that's obviously the best

solution for me. I'll check if

there is something like that in Jakarta taglib. I

believe someone here

mentioned a 'replace' tag.

But, for me this is still an interesting

question. The web application I'm

working on is very big and has a lot of text

input and output. All of our

inputted text should preserve linebreaks. Text

entered in regular text

fields doesn't have linebreaks anyway, and text

from textareas should have

breaks. I see that it isn't too pretty code to

always insert BR-tags in

bean:write, but couldn't this at least be an

option, like this:

bean:write name="myBean" property="myProp"

preserveLineFeed="false",

where preserveLineFeed would be true by default?

The tag would then use a

method like the breakNewlines(String) method

suggested below.

For my web application this would be far more

elegant than wrapping another

custom tag around every single bean:write that

needs to preserve line

breaks. As I said, the need to preserve

linebreaks is very common in my

experience, I rarely want to NOT preserve

linebreaks... At least for me

because most of the text that is outputted is

text inputted by a user in a

textfield or textarea.

The bean:write tag already has an attribute

"filter" that escapes

HTML-formatting, which in my opinion covers the

same kind of thing, how the

output looks when rendered in html, why is it not

elegant to do the same

thing for linebreaks?

At 12:02 23.10.2002 -0500, you wrote:

There are already taglibs that do this

transformation, aren't there?

Doesn't the taglibs project have things that

address this? Is there a way

to do this using the JSTL (Martin?)?

David Graham wrote:

If this is a common problem, maybe we could add

a method to Action like

breakNewLines(String) that does this

transformation. The <bean:write>

tag should not do any transformation, just

display what it's given.

What do you think?

Dave

--
Eddie Bush




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