DynaForm

[raj joe]

What are the advnatages and disadvantages of using DynaForms in struts.
Please can you give me an example

[Merrill Higginson]

advantages:

* you don't have to write subclasses of ActionForm. You define all your form beans and their properties in the struts-config.xml file.

disadvantages:

* It's more verbose and not as intuitive to extract properties
* the compiler will not catch your errors if you misspell a property name.

For example, if you have a proerty "name" in the form, here's how you get it using the a subclass of Action form:

String name = myForm.getName();

and here's how you get it using DynaActionForm:

String name = (String) dynaActionForm.get("name");

If you have to write code to get 25 different properties, which one would you rather use?


I personally seldom use DynaActionform. If you're using an IDE that has automatic generation of getters and setters, you can write an ActionForm class just as easily as you can write the XML for a DynaActionForm. Plus you get help from the compiler in checking the correctness of property names, as well as the use of your IDE's auto-completion function.