advice on design is needed

[Svetlana Koshkina]

Hi, guys!
For last two days I am trying to figure out how to implement one functionallity in struts. It would be great if you could help me out just a little bit.
I need to fill out protocol form. There are some easy fields such as title, version, authors etc. Those fit in a single page.
What troubles me is the protocol's body.
To support at least minimal formatting I decided to divide the body into
'subtitle' and 'subbody' pairs. There are theoretically should be no limits to how many of those will be in a protocol. This part can go on multiple pages.
The idea is that the user fills first page (title, authors etc), press 'continue' button and 'subtitle-subbody' textarea appears. After filling those out the user has two possibilities: by pressing 'continue' button he/she is getting next 'subtitle-subbody' page, by pressing 'Save', he/she submits this form and it goes to db in xml format so that when i want to present the protocol, i have hooks for necessary formatting.
I can't formulate the design clearly. I understand that I need one underlying bean that will be filled from the form and sent to the db. But how many forms should i have:
1. Should 'subtitle-subbody' section be as a separate form? So that I do not have limits on how many times the user pressess 'continue' button.
2. Or should i have one big form, but how i can implement unboundness of 'subtitle-subbody' part?
3. Probably in lights of having at least two diff. buttons i need LookupDispatchAction?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
The thing is that i have no experience and nobody to ask to. I was thinking that maybe there is just more or less tested and routine way of doing such things. I'm afraid that anything i come up with may be clumsy and amateurish.
:roll:

[Junilu Lacar]

Sounds to me like the subtitle-subbody portions need to be backed by an indexed property. See these links: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=struts+indexed+properties for more info

[Svetlana Koshkina]

Sure, it is not a problem, although it cannot be done in a form bean.
I looked at some suggestions on the web. It is said that it's better to have single form bean on multiple pages, but then i have to make fixed quantity of subtitle-subbody, and in order it is being sufficient most of the times it have to be fairly big, say 15-20. DynaForms are better, but still, you have to declare them in struts-config.
I decided to split form on general part and sub-part. Sub-part will be indexed in backing bean. I see that i will be able to traverse the bean easily back and forth by keeping track of the views.
:-)