JSF and Dynamic Forms

[Michael Sullivan]

Bill,
I apologize for my ignorance. That said, I've just had a primer to struts via my workplace, and last night I sat down with one of the few JSF texts at my local bookstore. One of the issues I face regularly is dynamic forms, created via values from a database. Struts handled this by using hash tables. How does JSF handle them?

Thanks,
Michael

[Bill Dudney]

Hi Michael,
JSF will work quite well with data fetched from the db. One place in the JSF spec to look at is the UIData component.
If you are referring to the concept of DynaActionForms in Struts then there is nothing specifically in place to replace DynaActionForms. However achieving the same effect is relatively easy with the EL syntax for value references. You could for example use #{myBean.dynaProps[attr1]} which would ask the bean 'myBean' for a Map with getDynaProps then issue a get with attr1 as the key.
In my opinion the Dyna* stuff in Struts always seemed like a hack to get around inflexibility. Just my $0.02 worth though...
Hope this helps.