I know exactly what you mean. What we decided on as a standard I store cats and dogs as Lists and then have getter/setter methods for Array objects which convert to/from a List on the fly.
I'm not sure if this adheres to OO principles but it's serves our purpose well. Zoran > 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]
