Struts, beans, and unique IDs

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to capture info from a web form using Struts, and I have a ActionForm (bean?) for that. When submitted (or instantiated - I don't know the details of how or when exactly it's being created), I want that bean to somehow get assigned a uniqueID so I could locate it easily in a database later.
Where and when should I be doing this? Is it in the action class after the form has been submitted that I should assign ID to the bean (bean.setID(generatedInt); - but that's not good practice, I think), or inside the bean in its constructor? Or maybe there's a simple and clean way Struts can do this?
And generally, is there good info on how and when the bean is being created by Struts? From Struts docs I got an idea of a bean representing a form through which the data is being submitted. Is this so?

Answer 1

There are beans and then there are beans. They are used for many purposes.
Struts ActionForm beans are used to gather together and validate the data from a JSP page (or some other view) and present it to the Action. Those are the beans they were probably talking about in the struts docs.
Your business logic for the most part should be stored in different beans from these ActionForm beans.
Database properties don't always correspond directly to all the fields on a form and vice versa. The whole point is that these business beans are your model - they should not in any way be affected by the view.
On assigning Ids - my approach would be to have it in your business layer, rather than in the action class. That would mean that the beans could be usable outside of struts. Each individual class should be responsible for getting its id - ideally the first time it is saved.
Just my 2 cents,
evnafets