Problem using struts tags in .jsp

Question

I have a page that fills in the appropriate user information in text fields when viewed. The problem is, i want to have a text field that shows the full name, but i only have getter and setter methods for firstname and lastname in my form bean. Is there a way to combine firstname and lastname to display the fullname using the <html:text> tag ???

Answer 1

You can use an ActionForm for your view that differs from the bean you are using. DynaActionForm would be ideal because it can be tedious to have a full complement of view beans that mirror your value objects.
The idea is to loadup a DynaActionForm with the values for the view before the JSP is called in an Action. The following shows the parts of this and some code for execute() that creates DynaActionForm.
If you have this bean in myapp/Contact.java
package myapp;
public class Contact {
private String firstName,lastName;
public String getFirstName() { return firstName; }
public String getLastName() { return lastName; }
public void setFirstName(String _firstName) { firstName = _firstName; }
public void setLastName(String _lastName) { lastName = _lastName; }
}Put this in the appropriatesecions in struts-config.xml
<form-bean name="ContactActionForm" type="org.apache.struts.action.DynaActionForm">
<form-property name="fullName" type="java.lang.String"/>
</form-bean>
<action path="/showContactForm"
        type="myapp.ShowContactActionForm">
  <forward name="success" path="/contactActionForm.jsp">
</action>
<action path="/handleContact"
        name="ContactActionForm"
        type="myapp.HandleContactActionForm">
  <forward name="success" path="/contactActionForm.jsp">
</action>And for the execute method in the ShowContactActionForm put...
Contact contact = db.getContact(contactId);
ModuleConfig mc = _mapping.getModuleConfig();
FormBeanConfig fbc = mc.findFormBeanConfig("ContactForm");
DynaActionFormClass dafc =
DynaActionFormClass.createDynaActionFormClass(fbc);
DynaActionForm theForm = (DynaActionForm)dafc.newInstance();
theForm.initialize(_mapping);
theForm.set("fullName", contact.getFirstName() + " " + contact.getLastName());
_request.setAttribute("ContactForm", theForm);
fwd = _mapping.findForward("success");