Split Values in a dropdown list

Question

Hi friends
i am stuck with a problem for which i need your help.i will list it out as below.
i am having a dropdown in my jsp page a ComboBox. The values in the dropdown are in the form
After 10 minutes
After 20 minutes
After 30 minutes
Before 5 minutes
Now when the user selects a value in the dropdown list ex. After 10 minutes. This value needs to be fetched and i have to retrive 10 & minutes seperately from the string "After 10 minutes" and the values should go into two different colums of 2 tables in the database.
I cannot use a DTO to set these values since the values will be combination pair of value & timetype.
What should be my approach here.
should i use a Hashmap or a Hashtable or some list so that i can send these values from the Action class to the Session Bean method.
please let me know what needs to be done in this case.waiting for a positive reply from your side.
Thanks & Regards
Vikram K

Answer 1

Create your own object which can store the different values and override the toString() method to display "After 10 Minutes" etc.
i.e.
private class MyClass {
   private int unit;
   private String measurement;
   public MyClass {
      super();
   // Getter and Setter Methods for fields
   public String toString() {
      return "After " + unit + " " + measurement;
}Then you can create a custom ComboBoxModel that contains your list of custom objects. Then it's a simple case of adding an ActionListener to the ComboBox to see which object the User has selected so you can then use the getter methods to pull the info you need and populate your table.