Has anyone run into a situation where it was desirable for users to execute an Action (a) and, while in the context of doing all of the lovely things associated with (a), the user gestures in a way that a second Action (a) process starts as a sort of child process -- in which case we have (temporarily) two ActionForms with different states competing for the same HTTP session name space?
My ActionForms are really just simple containers for the real value objects that get passed back and forth between the EJB container and the web tier. Because of the nature of Action (a) as a multi-page "wizard" sort of interface, it is convenient to keep the ActionForms (af) in the session scope. One solution I am considering is making modifications to the controller servlet to ask a custom workflow manager service for the proper ActionForm instance associated with the request and then having the controller servlet put that form in the proper session scope (or even request scope--I guess at the point where the controller is asking a service for the proper form, it might not be necessary to put any ActionForm in the HTTP session scope). Anyway, in this case the Actions themselves would be none the wiser about where they get their ActionForms. Of course, if I go this route, I'd need to add some sort of hidden field to each page that had some meaningful reference to a specific ActionForm object in order to facilitate the reassociation --or perhaps I could use a stack and and simply pop and push the appropriate ActionForms. Has anyone else ran had this sort of need? How did you solve it? thanks, Michael
