I mentioned Shale because of the whole prerender() idea that Craig talked about in another reply to this thread. I didn't know enough to specifically name the ViewController and prerender() methods though, I just remembered the basic concepts :) I think that aspect of Shale (and JSF too as I recall) is similar to what we're discussing. That's why I made the reference.

I too haven't been terribly excited by what I've seen of Shale, and JSF as well. I can say the same for ASP.Net incidentally. I'm not sold on the whole event-drived model yet. However, I *AM* keeping an open mind , and I do see many of the things these technolgies are trying to do as being something I might be interested in down the road, just not right now. That's why I have an interest in making Struts "classic" better, even folding some of the ideas from those other technologies into it. That's why this thread caught my interest in the first place. :)

I'll try and find the Wiki entry. Frankly, many times I can't find what I'm looking for on that thing, but I'll take a peek.

Frank

Dakota Jack wrote:
I have no interest in Shale personally. And, I don't think this idea
has been bounced around in that regard. The only interest I have in
this in a request driven web MVC setup, which Shale (JSF) is not. Shale is an event driven framework like Echo and Tapestry and is
essentially an attempt to make web programming available to those who
cannot understand what is happening: tools, in other words. This is
okay by me. But, I would rather do what works well than what serves
those who have limited knowledge well.


That much said.  I don't think Shale is related too much to this.  Not
sure why you were thinking that.  It was originally offered in
relation to Jericho.

Essentially it provides a set of interfaces between the model data
(database, etc.) and the view data (page, request, session,
application) scopes) which is not context but function based, sort of
like "AOP Data" to coin a combo-term.  I had the StrutsState posted on
the wiki.  The wiki keeps such information forever, of course, so it
is still there: just a bit harder to get to and really old news.


On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 17:56:40 -0500, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I for one would be interested in such a thing.  I was starting to think
about how to do this in a generic enough way too...

I was actually thinking of doing it declaratively, i.e., for each Action
mapping you could specify a list of setup methods to call, and Struts
would go ahead and do that right before it called your Action's
execute().  I figured you'd specify the class and method to call,
although even easier would be to write an actual SetupAction class, or
something along those lines, with a known interface that all these
classes would have to implement, then you would just specify the class
and Struts would know what method to call.  But, that would probably
mean only one setup method per setup class, and I'm not sure that would
be optimal.

I'm kind of babbling here :), but the basic idea I do like.

Did you post your StrutsState proposal anywhere?  I'd be interested in
seeing it.  I wonder if we were thinking along the same lines?

Then again, I know *someone* is going to point out that Shale (or I
guess JSF generically?) already has this notion ingrained in it.  That
might well be true, and I know neither of us are the first people to
mention such an idea (I've seen mention of this before numerous times),
but I for one think such a thing added to "classic" Struts would be very
nice indeed.

--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com

Dakota Jack wrote:

I think this solution is "the bomb".  I once suggested a generic
solution like this for Struts called StrutsState.  No one was much
interested, so I just built it for my own work.  It is so helpful that
I cannot express my gratitude toward myself to myself.  ///;-)


On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 14:27:08 -0500, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Someone else made some good suggestions about listeners and plugins.
These will work well if the dropdown contents are truly static.

If however it might be the kind of values that you want to make sure are
up-to-date, i.e., read from a database maybe...

Then one simple solution is create yourself a class that is basically
independant from your application that is used for setup for a paricular
screen or set of screens.  Create a static method for the setup, then

from any Action associated with a page that needs that data, just call

that static method at the start of the Action.  Simple, one line of code
per Action and one import (or none, if it's in the same package).

I would create static members of the setup class for the attribute
names, and make the static setup method(s) return something like an
ArrayList (or whatever type you need), so that you can call it from your
Actions with something like:

request.setAttribute(MySetupClass.MY_ATTRIBUTE_NAME,
MySetupClass.doSetup());

That way you aren't tied to it being a webapp, should you need to do a
different presentation layer later.

I think this is a decent, simple approach to this type of thing.

--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com

Ben Taylor wrote:


Hi,

Can anyone tell me if there is an easy way to put information
(required to populate drop down boxes using data from a db) in to the
request, without having to write a setup Action for each page as is
done here: http://www.reumann.net/struts/lesson2/step9.do .


Thank you for any help!

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