Table Driven menu

[Sharadha Sankar]

Hello All,

I am tring to write a java method that will create a menu which derives its menu items from a database table.

Current scenario.

When I click on the menu in my XSL file, It pulls the menu items from a XML file. something like this
<tr><td class="head" colspan="2" align="center"><br/>Country of Origin</td></tr>
<tr class="input">
<td colspan="2" align="center" class="input">
<SELECT id="country" name="country">
<xsl:for-each select="//country/CodeList/Entry">
<OPTION class="input">
<xsl:attribute name="value"><xsl:value-of select="code" /></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="name"/>
</OPTION>
</xsl:for-each>
</SELECT>
</td>
</tr>

where the list of country is stored in a file called country.xml

My need: Now when I click the menu, the data should be retrieved from a table which contains the various countries.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Merrill Higginson]

Since you're already set up to handle XML, you may want to write some simple code that will read a database table and turn it into XML. Besides this, Oracle and other RDBs have utilities that you may want to look into that will turn tables into XML.

[Sharadha Sankar]

Thanks for the prompt reply, but my requirement here is to avoid handling the data through XML. I just need to create a method which will derive data from the table and listens to the user's selection. Any feedbacks would be appreciated.
Thanks
Sharadha

[Merrill Higginson]

It seems like just using the standard Struts architecture will work just fine for this:

1-Call a Struts action that gets the information from the database and puts it in an ActionForm bean
2-Have the action forward to a JSP that retrieves the values from the ActionForm bean and creates the menu based on that information.