Multiple submit buttons in a jsp form?

Question

I've been doing some research and found out that multiple buttons in a JSP form are possible by two ways:
- We can obtain the value of the submit button to know which one was clicked in the parameters of the request using the name of the buttons (which should be the same for all the submit buttons).
- We can change the submit destination using Javascript (Horrible solution since I want my web site to be safe to be used even if Javascript isn't active in clients browsers. I will use it of course since we can do amazing things with it but I want my website to be able to work without it also)
WHAT annoys me is the fact that the value of a submit button is also his text, so if I change the text of the submit button, I will always have to check the servlet to do the corresponding change.
Is there a third choice to be able to use multiple buttons?
Olivier Voutat

Answer 1

It seem rather convoluted at first but it's really good. I've not worked with JSF so I've no idea how that compares but from what I know, Craig McClanahan, who came up with Struts, worked on JSF also, so I guess it could only improve on Struts.
EDIT: Here's a search result on Google'ing his name: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29068
But like I said, you don't have to use Struts ( which only uses standard JSP/ Servlets stuff anyway ), you simply use one of the ideas from it.
For example; you have a properties file, say "/WEB-INF/properties/myProps.properties" with these entries:
#USERS MODULE
users.button.save=Save User
users.button.search=Search User By Name
users.button.delete=Delete UserThis would be a key: users.button.save to the value Save User
Now, in your JSP, you use JSTL <fmt> tags:
<fmt:setBundle basename="properties.myProps"/>
//set the resource bundle you want to use
//and create buttons with the proper values
<input name="myButton" type="submit"><fmt:message key="users.button.save"/></input>
<input name="myButton" type="submit"><fmt:message key="users.button.search"/></input>This would create buttons with text "Save User" and "Search User By Name" respectively
Now, finally, in your servlet:
//create a map of the properties,
//possibly on app startup using a ServletContextListener
//and put it in the servlet context for access everywhere
HashMap myProps = (HashMap)getServletContext.getAttribute("myPropertiesMap");
String buttonClicked = request.getParameter("myButton");
if ( buttonClicked.equals((String)myProps.get("users.button.save")) )
//perform save action
else if ( buttonClicked.equals((String)myProps.get("users.button.search")) )
//perform search action
//etcYou'll obviously want to optimize this. Perhaps make a method that handles the comparison so you can have neater if conditions. But you get the idea, right?
Edited by: nogoodatcoding on Oct 4, 2007 8:12 PM