Michael Jouravlev wrote:
Then you display page 2, it loads firstName from
ActionForm and displays it. If you change the name and submit page 2,
it stores changed name back in ActionForm. If you go back to page 1
and the page is not cached, it will be reloaded from server with
updated firstName. Seems quite normal to me ;-) If pages are cachable,
then page 1 would show stale data. But I do not use cachable pages.
That's a fair point, I didn't think of it that way. I guess it comes
down more to the wizard design... if the firstName field *is* meant to
be the same, as you describe, then there's no problem. It's when it's
intended to be two different things that just happen to be the same name
that there's a problem.
Now I have to go look back at the issue my colleague experienced because
now I'm not sure what happened there... as I recall, the second page DID
NOT show the data entered on the first, and the problem *was* corrected
by having two different field names, but now I'm thinking something else
was going on there.
In this wizard http://www.superinterface.com/strutsdialog/wizardaction.do
the last page shows the same data that was entered on the first page.
First page has <html:text name="wizardform"
property="signupWizard.stepSignup.name"/>
Last page has <bean:write name="wizardform"
property="signupWizard.stepSignup.name"/>
Granted, last page just shows the name, but I could use regular text
fields as well. I don't think that such data sharing can be regarded
as data corruption. It is *the same* data after all.
Right, again it seems like it comes down to what the intend was... is
the firstName field on one page meant to be the same as another.
Michael.
Frank
On 11/16/05, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Imagine you have a single ActionForm with a firstName field. Now
imagine you have two wizard pages that are used in sequence, and you
want to use the same ActionForm for both.
Assume the form is stored in session, as you would expect in a wizard.
Now, imagine there is a firstName field on both HTML forms of both
wizard pages... you might argue this isn't a good wizard design, and I
would tend to agree, but it's something that can happen in some cases.
Now, assume a prototypical Struts app, no Struts Dialogs extensions or
anything...
What happens when the first page submits? The firstName field is
populated in the ActionForm. Now what about when the second form is
submitted? The value of the firstName field in the ActionForm now has
the value from the second form submission, effectively overwriting the
value the user entered on the first page, so if the user were to go back
to the first wizard page, they would incorrectly see the data from the
second page in effect. Easily to explain, but to the user it's a data
corruption issue.
This is the scenario I was referring to. Does your Dialogs stuff
overcome that? If so, how? Whether it does or not, a "normal" Struts
app will certainly have this problem, hence my comment about making sure
the field names are different... in this case, it might be as simple as
making two fields in the ActionForm, one named firstNamePage1 and
firstNamePage2.
Frank
Michael Jouravlev wrote:
On 11/16/05, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The one thing to keep in mind if you go [one ActionForm] route is
to be sure you don't have a field on one page
with the same name as another. I had one junior developer make that
mistake and it drove him nuts trying to figure out what was wrong
(obvious in retrospect, but one of those "tricky at the time" problems
to solve).
I don't see right away how does this matter if you have separate
submits from a browser each time. Also would not matter if you
redirect between pages and don't intentionally stuff values into
redirected request. Redirected request comes clean, so same fields or
not - does not matter. This is why my two-phase request processing
works: POST comes with input data, form is populated, then I redirect
to the same action again, GET comes clean, form is not updated because
request contains no data.
Forwarded request brings all input data with it, and Struts applies
this data to another form. Been there ;)
--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
AIM: fzammetti
Yahoo: fzammetti
MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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