As I've been investigating the inner workings of the JavascriptValidatorTag
in Struts v1.2 - how it interacts with the FormTag, the ValidatorPlugin and
different types of ValidatorForms - I've come to realize that the current
versions of the FormTool and the ValidatorTool lack some vital
functionality.
At present the FormTool is mainly a convenience tool to access the form bean
associated with the current action.
The fact is there should be no need to specify a form bean for an action
that simply displays a form that's empty or that only contains the default
values.
The Struts FormTag OTOH uses it's action-attribute (action-mapping path) to
find an ActionConfig from which it retrieves the form name. It then creates
an instance of the form bean (if need be) and puts it in the scope and under
the name specified in said ActionConfig.
This feature i.e. allows us to have one struts action display multiple
different forms that all have the appropriate form beans instantiated and
ready to use.
At present the ValidatorTool, like the FormTool, uses the form bean
associated with the current action to render the dynamic javascript. This
is not how it should work for the reason stated above - it should not
require a form to be associated with the action that displays the form. On
the contrary the getDynamicJavascript() method of the ValidatorTool should
always require a formName parameter that matches the form name of
_submitting action_ (the ValidatorTool takes care of changing the formName
in the case of ValidatorActionForms or DynaValidatorActionForms). The
ValidatorTool then relies on the FormTool having instantiated said form bean
in scope and rendered the correct name-attribute for the html form.
AFAICS there is no elegant solution to this problem using tools;
<form name="$form.setAction('someAction')"
action="$link.setAction('someAction')"> ... </form>
... since setAction() for both FormTool and LinkTool in this case need
matching parameters (the action path) - this would go down in my book as a
Bad Solution. The setAction(String) method of the FormTool finds the
relevant ActionConfig and instantiates the relevant form bean appropriately.
It then return the name of the form as specified in the ActionConfig.
An alternative would be to let the FormTool render the whole html form-tag
... but that would go against the Velocity Philosophy(tm) - and for good
reason!.
IMHO this would be a prime candidate for a standard global macro lib ;-)
#renderHtmlFormTag('someAction')
Thoughts?
cheers,
Marin�
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