In Struts 1.0 - 1.2, there's no way to do this other than by overriding RequestProcessor and dinking with the processPopulate() method. With the way 1.3 is evolving, it would be feasible to make the Command that normally does population do something different instead.
That was indeed one of my possible solutions. However, what I'm doing doesn't warrant such effort, not by a long-shot.
I can see where you're coming from, but I sure wonder how many people are going to be surprised by this behavior that is so different from the Struts norm.
Fair point. I actually wound up just returning an ArrayList as a request attribute with the info I wanted to display. That's really all I needed, but I've gotten away from ever passing data back to the view this way, hence my original question. There were of course other options that would have gotten an ActionForm there, but in the end I figured KISS was the way to go.
BTW, when upload gets integrated into Shale (I keep hearing Martin talk about some upgrades to Commons FileUpload that I'd sure like to see happen first :-), my thinking is that simple properties would still be populated normally, but properties representing uploaded files would get populated with an implementation of some adapter API that bridges the difference between files that got cached in memory, stored on disk, or whatever. That way, the only behavior that is different is that for the file upload field(s) -- everything else continues to work as it does in a non-file-upload scenario.
I sometimes wonder if we (the generic we I mean) don't sometimes think at too high a level... We try to build so much flexibility into our designs, but every time I hear "a new API" or "a new interface" or "another abstraction layer" or any of those somewhat similar terms (you know, the ones spewed forth by enterprise architects ad nauseum!), I wonder if the cost of the added flexibility isn't too high in terms of overall complexity.
Eh, just a personal musing of mine. Your plan as stated sounds pretty good :)
Craig
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
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