I can't read Craig's mind ;-) , but I would say that the main reason an ActionForm's constructor doesn't get passed the request (or anything else) is because it is (intended to be) a form *bean*. One of the primary characteristics of a JavaBean is that is that it must have a no-args constructor. That allows it to be instantiated from anywhere. Passing a request instance to the constructor presupposes that an ActionForm is constructed only in the context of a request.
A secondary reason, in my mind, is that passing a request to the constructor would encourage people to stash it away as member data, which would not be too cool if the bean was created in session scope... -- Martin Cooper "Jeff Skubick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Is the absence of a reference to the HttpServletRequest object that triggered the creation of a new ActionForm object in its constructor a historical artifact or oversight, or was it an intentional decision whose motivation and rationale remains 100% valid and relevant today? At the moment, I'm in a quandry. I see no way to usefully use nested form beans to encapsulate administrable users in my web app without somehow getting a hold of a list of objects representing those administrable users from the session context of the user who's administering them (the list's composition depends partially upon the user doing the administration) so I can prepopulate the list for its initial display. On the other hand, I'm worried that ActionForm's original creator was absolutely determined to keep ActionForm's constructor from ever knowing anything about the user or request that triggered its creation in the first place for some reason, like Struts casually re-using old ActionForm instances to satisfy new requests. On the other hand, I know it might just be a historical artifact that seemed like a good idea at the time, but doesn't really have any major implications either way. 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? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
