So... if I implement my own RequestProcessor class that overrides the default processActionForm method to call my own ActionForm-extending bean's constructor an explicitly pass it a reference to the HttpServletRequest object so it can fetch the HttpSession object and find the object that tells it everything else it needs to know to pre-populate the form bean prior to display, am I violating any sacred assumption made by other parts of Struts? Or am I OK?
I do think that the original intention was to have ActionForm beans be lightweight and no smarter than they need to be (of course, they do have validate() and reset() methods.) Most Struts classes use no-arg constructors, following the JavaBean specifications.
Generally speaking, I'm not sure that changing the request processor really helps you solve your problem, as Struts doesn't really directly handle the idea of an "output" form -- a form populated on the way to displaying a page. The ActionForm you get in an Action is really an "input" form wrapping the request parameters. In some cases you could have an ActionMapping which used the same type of form bean for input and output, but practically, this is rarely what you need -- more often, you step from one form to the next, unless you use a session scoped, multi-page form bean, which can work, but which can behave oddly sometimes too.
On my current project, we're experimenting with the struts-chain request processor, which makes controlling the overall request process cycle much much more flexible. We've added in a "PagePrep" command between "execute action" and "process forward" that looks up a "renderer" based on the path in the forward config and executes the renderer before forwarding. The renderer configuration is not too different from the action-mapping section of struts-config, and includes a form bean name and scope for the "output" form. It would be rather harder to interpose this using the strict set of extension points defined by the RequestProcessor, but using struts-chain, it was very straightforward.
Note that struts-chain is still under development -- features like tiles and file uploads have just been added in the last few weeks, and it's possible that some other things don't work quite the way they do using the Struts 1.1 RequestProcessor. But it really does work for most things, and the more that other people use it, the sooner it will work for everything!
Joe
--
Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."
-- Jef Raskin
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