Using Struts ActionForm to collect multiline input

Question

I am trying to build an inventory page that displays a list
of items on a page and lets you update and items price or
quantity available. I know how to build a static ActionForm
that does say username and password. I also know how to build
an InventoryBean which returns a collection of ItemBean's.
I can't figure out how to have a dynamic ActionForm. Here
is what I have so far...
Here are the struts-config snipets:
<form-bean name="inventoryForm"
type="ww.caps.inventory.InventoryForm"/>
<action path="/inventory"
type="ww.caps.inventory.InventoryAction"
name="inventoryForm"
scope="request"
input="/inventory.jsp">
</action>
here is some of the JSP:
<html:form action="/inventory">
<table>
<logic:iterate id="item" name="invent" property="items">     
<tr>
<td align="CENTER" valign="CENTER">
<bean:write name="item" property="sku"/>
</td>
<td align="CENTER" valign="CENTER">
<html:text name="item" property="priceString" size="6" maxlength="8"/>
</td>
</logic:iterate>
</table>
</html:form>
This paints the page with <INPUT>'s just fine but the name of the
price inputs is NOT indexed so there is no way to capture the data
back, not to mention matching it with the right row in the database.
Any examples or hints on how to solve this problem would be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks,
Wayne R. Baldwin

Answer 1

Use a java Collection (probably an ArrayList) to store your list of items:
class MyForm extends ActionForm {
  private static ITEM_COUNT = 10;
  private Collection items = new ArrayList();
    for (int i = 0; i < ITEM_COUNT; i++)
      items.add(new Item());
  public Collection getItems() { return items; }
class Item {
  private String value;
  public void setValue(String data) { value = data; }
  public String getValue() { return value; }
}When struts sees a parameter like this passed into the POST:
items[0].value=test
it will do the same as if you had coded this in Java:
Collection c = getItems();
Item i = (Item)c.get(0);
i.setValue("test");