> Hello all, I am new to this mailing list, and Tomcat, so please pe
> patient...
>
> I am using Servlets to recieve html form submissions.
>
> Problem is that the form fields are in a particular order on
> the form, but
> when I get the Parameters from the request object this field order is
> gone...
>
> The post data comes in in the proper order, but I can not recover the
> ordering. If it was only 1 form I was dealing with, I could
> write code to
> format a response, but the app is very generalized, and it is
> designed to
> handle many different forms.
>
> So the question. Is there no way in tomcat to preserve the
> ordering of
> parameters from a form submission?
No. This is servlet API thing, not a tomcat thing. I think it's a bad
idea to develop servlet to depend on the order in which a request object
is formed because you never know for sure that an ordering is going to
be fixed. For example, say a hashing algorithm is used for speed up
access. How do you order the elements of a hash table? The only thing
I could suggest is preface every form element with its' order, 1st element
would be 0_elementname and 9th element would be 8_elementname, then order
the elements yourself, but I think this is kind of sloppy.
---
Michael Wentzel
Software Developer
Software As We Think - http://www.aswethink.com
