Techniques for form editing

By: aathishankaran

A tag library such as the one that comes with the server may not be available in your environment. How can you allow similar features without using a tag library?

It is a little tedious, but it can be done. Basically, you must edit each HTML tag yourself, and put in a default value. The following examples shows how we modify GetName.jsp to provide features similar to blx:getProperty but with manual HTML tag editing:

<jsp:useBean id="user" class="user.UserData" scope="session"/>

<HTML>


<BODY>


<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="SaveName.jsp">


What's your name? <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=username SIZE=20
VALUE="<%= user.getUsername() %>"><br>

What's your e-mail address? <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=email SIZE=20
VALUE="<%= user.getEmail() %>"><br>

What's your age? <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=age SIZE=4 VALUE=<%= user.getAge()
%>><br>

<P><INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT>


</FORM>


</BODY>


</HTML>

As you can see, this simply involves adding a "VALUE" field in the INPUT tags, and initializing the field with an expression!

To handle exceptions during input processing, a simple approach is to use "String" fields in the bean, and do the conversion to the target data type yourself. This will allow you to handle exceptions.