I've just begun studying the struts examples and reading the documentation and have waited a bit before I posted this question. I am a newbie to struts but have done some searching and looking at examples but still need some more help.
Before I begin it would be best if I ask my questions in the context of a simple example. Lets say we have a simple Employee Administration application where there might a form that allows you to enter or edit employee information. Now first off, it would seem likely using struts that I would have an EmployeeForm object and then maybe two action objects such as AddEmployee and EditEmployee (or possibly just one of them that can do all the tasks). Now it would seem like for most situations you would have an EmployeeForm object and also an EmployeeBean. Now the question I have is at what point would you transfer the info in the EmployeeForm object to the EmployeeBean? Should this be done in the AddAction and then the AddAction might call a method in the business tier of doInsert( EmployeeBean employee )? Or do you possibly just pass all the form parameters off to a doInsert() method as arguments and then in the business tier doInsert() method do what you have to do with them. I'm having some trouble seeing how they manage this with the SaveSubscriptionAction in the strut example. It looks like they are using PropertyUtils.copyProperties(subscription, subform); to get the information from the subform into a subscription object. (I admit I haven't studied using this PropertyUtils objects so I'll have to look into it). However, I'm still just generally confused about the best way to get the values in my EmployeeForm object which are all Strings into the correct format for being entered into a database. Before looking into this struts framework, my controler servlet would pass the request object off to the appropriate Action class which in turn might hand the request object to another class method that would create an EmployeeBean from the request object parameters. Than after that EmployeeBean was returned the appropriate method in the business logic tier was called such as businessTierObject.addEmployee( employeeBean ); The validation abilities using FormObjects seem really powerful, yet I'm still stuck on where to do all my casting and conversions of the String request parameters into the proper data types (ie..birth date as a String to birthDate as a java.util.Date, ss# as a String to an int, etc). I guess my basic question is where should this process take place? Do you pass the whole Form object in the Action object off to the business tier and let that level deal with creating the correct format of the request parameters? I'm sure this has all been brought up and/or answered many times so I appreciate your patience. Is there a way I can search through past posts to this mailing list? Thanks for any help. -- Rick mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "I can't stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like, 'Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me?' or 'Do you have that $50 you borrowed?' Man, quit being so cheap!" -Jack Handey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
