Ok, that's quite interesting.. I think I just need to find a efficient way of doing the deep copy because my parent class has thousands of attributes in all including nested attributes..
Thanks ! -----Original Message----- From: Rick Reumann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 2:37 PM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Re: Inheritance within form beans On 10/3/07, Kothari, Kailash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks a lot Rick. That gives me a new area to explore. > > The BeanUtils method - BeanUtils.copyProperties(Object target, Object > src) - does give me a shallow copy of an object, Im trying to figure > out how to get a deep copy.. I might be the only one that does this, but I have all my form beans extend an abstract BaseActionForm that has these two methods: public void populateValueObject(Object obj) throws IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException { BeanUtils.copyProperties(obj, this); } public void populateForm(Object obj) throws IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException { BeanUtils.copyProperties(this, obj); } The default behavior is nothing interesting - for example in a setUpFormForEdit method in an Action: public ActionForward setUpFormForEdit(...) { EmployeeForm eForm = (EmployeeForm)form; Employee employee = serviceLayer.getEmployee(someID); eForm.popluateForm( employee ); } Similar thing on the way out : public ActionForward doEdit(...) { EmployeeForm eForm = (EmployeeForm)form; Employee employee = new Emloyee(); eForm.populateValueObject( employee ); serviceLayer.doUpdate(employee); } Where it becomes more interesting is when you have cases where BeanUtils can't do everything. For example, I've had cases where if certain items in a form were checked, it would alter what I do the resulting ValueObject and same thing the other way. In a more common sense, sometimes people might have a form with a month, date, and year form fields but ultimately your value object just needs a single "date." I found it nicer in these cases then to just override those base class methods and make sure my form and value object is populated correctly there instead of doing all that mess in my Action class. In your case this is where you'd do your deep copy stuff.... YourCustomActionForm extends YourBaseBeanActionForm { public void populateForm(Object obj) { //maybe first get a base shallow copy of some things //BeanUtils.copy or call super.populateForm(obj) //now do your custom deep copy stuff as needed } --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
