How to prepopulate a form in Struts
By: Apache Foundation Printer Friendly Format
The simplest way to prepopulate a form is to have an Action
whose sole purpose is to populate an ActionForm
and forward to the
servlet or JSP to render that form back to the client. A separate Action
would then be use to process the submitted form fields, by declaring an instance
of the same form bean name.
The struts-example example application that is shipped with Struts
illustrates this design pattern nicely. Note the following definitions from the struts-config.xml
file:
... <form-beans> ... <-- Registration form bean --> <form-bean name="registrationForm" type="org.apache.struts.webapp.example.RegistrationForm"/> ... </form-beans> ... <action-mappings> ... <-- Edit user registration --> <action path="/editRegistration" type="org.apache.struts.webapp.example.EditRegistrationAction" name="registrationForm" scope="request" validate="false"/> ... <-- Save user registration --> <action path="/saveRegistration" type="org.apache.struts.webapp.example.SaveRegistrationAction" name="registrationForm" input="registration" scope="request"/> ... </action-mappings>
Note the following features of this approach:
- Both the
/editRegistration
and/saveRegistration
actions use the same form bean. - When the
/editRegistration
action is entered, Struts will have pre-created an empty form bean instance, and passed it to theexecute()
method. The setup action is free to preconfigure the values that will be displayed when the form is rendered, simply by setting the corresponding form bean properties. - When the setup action completes configuring the properties of the form
bean, it should return an
ActionForm
that points at the page which will display this form. If you are using the Struts JSP tag library, theaction
attribute on your <html:form> tag will be set to/saveRegistration
in order for the form to be submitted to the processing action. - Note that the setup action (
/editRegistration
) turns off validation on the form that is being set up. You will normally want to include this attribute in the configuration of your setup actions, because you are not planning to actually process the results -- you simply want to take advantage of the fact that Struts will precreate a form bean instance of the correct class for you. - The processing action (
/saveRegistration
), on the other hand, leaves out thevalidate
attribute, which defaults totrue
. This tells Struts to perform the validations associated with this form bean before invoking the processing action at all. If any validation errors have occurred, Struts will forward back to your input page (technically, it forwards back to anActionForward
named "registration" in this case, because the example webapp uses theinputForward
attribute in the<controller>
element -- see the documentation describingstruts-config.xml
for more information) instead of calling your processing action.
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Archived Comments
1. Thanks for the info
View Tutorial By: info at 2010-01-31 12:17:58
2. Where should I call the action /editRegistration?
View Tutorial By: Andrei at 2013-03-08 12:21:07
3. agrohimvuz
View Tutorial By: agrohimerx at 2017-07-23 14:54:32
4. delmetheg
View Tutorial By: delmetuca at 2017-07-26 03:44:29