Lets assume you want to be a good OO developer and you are designing an application to handle CRUD stuff for a "Person." Lets say this Person can own Cats and Dogs. So person might look like...
Person ------ int personId String personName List dogs; //list of Dog objects List cats; //list of Cat objects Your backend persistence layer of choice knows how to deal with this Person. When it goes to insert/update a Person it knows how to update the PersonDog and PersonCat tables with respective dog and cat ids. Where I always run into problems is how to best handle this kind of stuff on the front end in Struts for multi select options (and also using multibox with checkboxes). The dilemma first is "What should your PersonActionFrom hold in relation to Cats and Dogs when all you need to capture is Dog/Cat Ids on you form?" The standard practice often espoused is your ActionForm should only be interested in capturing the inputted data - so in this case it would be String[] catIds, String[] dogIds. This is what I'm currently doing, but it then requires an extra conversion to convert these ids into "Dog" and "Cat" objects so that I could pass a full "Person" object to the backend/service layer. (You also have to convert going back the other way as well for when you want to do an update.) Typically I use BeanUtils to do my copying of properties from ActionForm --> ValueObject and back the other direction as well. Currently I'm having to use special helper covert methods that use a combination of BeanUtils and the custom conversions for stuff like taking a String[] dogIDs and building Dog objects from them. Just curious on approaches other people use and how do other frameworks, like JSF, deal with this since they don't use ActionForms. (For example if I have a "Person" backing bean with "Cats" and "Dogs" in it, and my multiselect list allows me to choose dogs and cats, how do these get updated in the backing bean. -- Rick --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
