My application allows a user to make various different types of bookings for a (fictional!!!) hospital and logs them in a database. Each type of booking has a set of common properties but also different ones depending on the type of booking being made.
I have divided my classes into a BookingAction and BookingActionForm superclass and subclasses (such as AmbulanceBookingAction and AmbulanceBookingActionForm) because I anticipate creating other subtypes of BookingAction that use the same properties in the BookingAction class but not in the AmbulanceBookingAction subclass. This initially seemed to me to be in keeping with programming for code re-use and extensibility.
I have just one Action class for the whole app that all my Action subclasses inherit. It does all the common processing that I need. It is now after 2 years on the project fairly complex but it is really all common functionality.
I can't see any need in my situation for having a different Action superclass for each module.
My problem with this is, if a user submits a form which posts its data via the ActionServlet to the AmbulanceBookingAction subclass, how would I ensure the BookingAction class did its stuff? Would it be better / easier to use separate, non-derived (from my superclasses) Actions and ActionForms to handle each type of booking and not subclass BookingAction and BookingActionForm (even though I would be repeating the some of the same properties common to each different type of booking)?
You make sure they do their stuff because they have the perform() or execute() method, and they call the actual AmbulanceBookingAction for example.
I am concerned, though, not to lose points for not reusing code. It just seems to me, though, that trying to divvy the handling of the form data via inheritance is too complicated and / or unnecessary.
I once had a ActionForm superclass with getter / setter methods for frequently occuring fields - but dropped it because the advantage was trivial. And I started using DynaActionForms.
Adam -- struts 1.1 + tomcat 5.0.16 + java 1.4.2 Linux 2.4.20 Debian
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