When creating sub-form components I find that a common case is composing several form fields into a single object which is bound as a parameter back to the parent.
For example a date component used on several forms that has drop downs for day & month, and a text box for year. The parameter bound to the parent page is simply a date (a Date object or a String form - doesn't matter) which is composed from the three separate form elements. The only way I know of to support this is to used the setter for the last form element's property to set the bound parameter with the composed object. (this is the technique used in the T5 book) This works okay, but I've never been very happy with it and recently it meant that I had to copy a component class to extend it because of using this technique. This is because the properties are private (T5 requires this) and the setter for one has a side effect that causes problems. This got me to thinking (again) if there was an alternative technique for achieving this, and if there wasn't then how could it potentially be done. So, does anyone currently have a better way than the one I've described? I was thinking that this could potentially be achieved by another component event as part of the form submission. Each component within the form (not just the parent of the form) would need an event firing after the properties have all been set from the submission, and before validation, where they could update bound parameters with composed objects from the form properties. Is this at all possible to achieve? Thanks, Andy.
