If your page is read-only, then you are a lucky bastard ;-) and can use whatever you want. Strictly speaking, you you do not have to use ActionForm at all. I personally believe that the only value of ActionForm class is when it is combined with <html:form> tag and you build data entry form. This is why?
Say, you use two actions (render action and input action) and one actionform to build a data entry form. Say you have MyForm formbean, and it contains nested business object like Customer with properties name and address. Your render action displays a JSP page with <html:form> pointing to submit action. When JSP page is rendered, Struts checks what actionform corresponds to an action mapping referred in "action" attribute of <html:form>. This is the same formbean that you have prepared in your render action. Then you have say <html:text property="name" /> and <html:text property="address" />. Struts does the following: * it generate HTML tags for your properties: <input type="text" name="..." value="..."/> * it locates a proper actionform, locates properties in it and writes out their values to "value" attributes. * it builds a so-called keypath for your properties, like "MyForm.customer.name" and "MyForm.customer.address" and writes them to "name" attributes. Whew, render phase has finished. Now when you submit this form, it is sent to your submit action, which uses what a coincedence! the same actionform, MyForm. Struts processes the request parameters that have names "MyForm.customer.name" and "MyForm.customer.address", parses these names and sticks then into a real Java object, which is the same Customer object nested in MyForm actionform. Voila, you did not have to do anything for this I/O process. This is why having the same actionform for both render and input actions is important. You can use one action as well if you can distinguish between phases, usually POST for input and GET for render. This lengthy explanation serve simply as a reasoning for actionform usage, it works best for data entry form use case. If you have read-only form or input-only service that does not redisplay the same page, then you don't really need actionform. Actionform is just a Java object that is stored in an appropriate scope by Struts for you. You can do the same with your own beans. Ultimately all goes to servlet container and it treats Struts actionforms or regular Java beans equally. Hope this helps ;-) On 7/18/06, Mississippi John Hurt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But what if my jsp page that I want to display the DAO info is a read only page ie. doesn't have an <html:form> element on it? Would I still populate the ActionForm and use it to display or would I just pass a regular POJO to jsp and use <bean:write> or jsp or scriptlet to display? On 7/18/06, Michael Jouravlev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 7/18/06, Mississippi John Hurt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I know ActionForm can be used to transfer html-form-input-fields to the > > Action class. But what about the other way around? Can it be used to say > get > > a DAO object and transfer its properties to the ActionForm, which when > the > > request is forwarded to a jsp, is readily available or populates the > labels > > on the screen. > > Of course. See this for some insights: > http://wiki.apache.org/struts/StrutsManualActionClasses You can use > one action or two actions and just one actionform. The actionform acts > as I/O buffer.
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