I was just replying to a post about keeping your Actions clean and doing
the business logic in other classes.
One thing I didn't bring up, though, because I'm not sure how 'best
practice' it is, is the concept of passing your ActionForm and sometimes
the HttpServletRequest off to another class for some processing. I'm
doing that a bit in this app I'm currently working on and I'm liking it.
Here are my thoughts. Typically I've dones this kind of stuff in my
dispatch Action methods....
SomeForm sForm = (SomeForm)form;
//some validation now possibly
SomeVO vo = new SomeVO();
BeanUtils.copyProperties( vo, form );
service.update( vo );
//save some success message or error message
The above is quite simple but sometimes there are some other things that
have to be done that aren't alway orthodox... ie, maybe having to
build more than one VO from a form, or maybe some logic looking at
certain form/request parameters to dictate some slightly altered service
class method to call. All of this stuff tends to staring bloat the
Action class which is supposed to mainly be a controller. I've started
now playing around with pushing some of this off to another class and
the Action then becomes mostly just responsible for 1) validation 2)
saving any success or error messages 3) fowarding
So what happens is the Action looks like...
//EmployeeAction
execute(...) or dispatchmethod() {
EmployeForm empForm = (EmployeeForm)form;
//validate form, if success proceed..
boolean success = EmployeeActionHelper.updateEmployee( empForm,
request );
//messages set up based on success or failure
}
The above hides all the mundane copy form properties to vo and any other
logic (for example if returning a List you could put that in scope in
the Helper).
Possibly all of this is overkill, but it came about based on a real use
case. The situation is when CRUD operations are selected from the form,
the type of Value Object created and the type of Service that gets
called is based on a requirement passed in by the form. What gets done
when the form is submitted can be very different based on the type of
object being represented when the form submits, so I needed a way to get
a unique type of Service/Delegate base on the ID. I found it clean to
isolate all of this from the Action, so the Action method looks like...
update(..) {
MyForm myForm = (MyForm)form;
ServiceFactory.getService( myForm.getTypeID ).update( myForm );
//other stuff
Now since the correct Service is obtained, it can do the copying of
proeprties to the unique value object and can call the approrpriate DAO
that is in that service class.
Anyway, I'm just babbling:)
--
Rick
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