I have a project which gives the user interface to create the Dynamic forms on the fly.
User can select different fields like textbox, textarea, date etc and create a model for the same.
Once the user chooses the component and creates a form, then we need to show that form at a specifies place. The form components are rendered through common jsp page which accepts pojo object and then distributes that object to our own custom created tags for input,checkbox,radio,date etc.
Issue is it takes very 10-15 seconds to render the form.
Is there a way i can create templates or say html code of created forms and store them in DB and render through them. (Provided i am able to still bind data using Spring MVC, show dropdown values, selected or saved data in the fields.)
You may want to take a look at Metawidget. It renders different forms inside a common JSP as you describe, and does not have the 10-15 second issue you are seeing.
Metawidget is Open Source, so you can examine how it works, or even use it 'as is' (it is designed to be embedded inside projects such as yours). There's a good example tutorial here: http://metawidget.org/doc/reference/en/html/ch01s03.html#section-introduction-part2-web
Better way is to create you own custom tags and remove repeated code.
This will decrease the compilation time and further decreases the loading time of the page.
Related
JSP Application programming
Which is better
Coding in minimal number of JSP pages with multiple if conditions
For example inserting sales,costs,expenses,customers,products etc with an if statement with variables.
if(variableValue=='Sales'
{
Sales insert code
}
else if(variableValue='Costs'
{
costs insert code
}
Creating multiple pages.
salesinsert.jsp
costinsert.jsp
etc
which is better and good programming. what are the advantages and disadvantages in short term and long term
Performance
Maintanence
Migration to a different technology stack (such as java to python)
I know it is not good to write application logic in JSP. But unfortunately i cannot change it now. Both the ways i am coding logic in jsp page itself
This code isn't compatible with MVC pattern you should follow:
The model is the central component of the pattern. It is the application's dynamic data structure, independent of the user interface. It directly manages the data, logic and rules of the application.
A view can be any output representation of information, such as a chart or a diagram. Multiple views of the same information are possible, such as a bar chart for management and a tabular view for accountants.
The third part or section, the controller, accepts input and converts it to commands for the model or view.
JSP is view component and should decide which data to represent, but controller,
which can be ActionServlet in struts
ActionServlet acts like FrontController pattern.
It all depends on the size of the JSP pages:
Put it in the same page if the resulting JSP file has a reasonable size (less than 300 lines)
Create seperate JSP files / tag files if the combined page would be too big and if you can split it without adding a lot of complexity for passing data to the sub pages.
if statements in JSP files aren't necessarily application logic. Often you have the case that depending on some value part of the page is shown or not. I'd rather call this view logic. The same goes for for loops if you have a repeating view element.
You certainly don't want to have SQL, data manipulation, data validation etc. in JSP.
In Stuts2 I am using Tiles plugin to create a layout for the website (menu, footer, header etc.) that is consistent on every page.
Now each tile is just a static HTML content.
Is it possible to make a Tile more dynamic by eg. calling a Footer action class every time the footer is to be rendered? For example: to fetch footer content from database.
If I was to do that inside every page's action class in my application this would make for a very unusable code...
So maybe it is possible from Tile perspective?
There is only one way to do what you ask with a tiles version less than 2.2.2 and that is with a "preparer".
This however is not an integration with struts2 but would mean the preparer it self will access the service layer to get the required content for the view and all that content would need to be set though tiles attributes.
With tiles versions 2.2.2 and higher:
You can use OGNL expressions within tiles attributes, this can allow access to some struts2 interaction as well as static method access. With static method access you can call a method to return a string how ever you want. Creating such a string would be on par with writing a scriptlet.
To upgrade you need to either manually override some jars to get tiles 2.2.2, or to get version three you will need to implement your own result type: How to integrate Struts 2 with Tiles 3.
I don't actually recommend either of the above methods at this time, tiles 3 is recommended but not as an excuse to do something as bad as writing a scriptlet. It would probably be better to use the s:action tag in a tile, as mentioned by David or use an Ajax method as mentioned by Jaiwo99. The reason being that both these methods keep with struts2 while the ones I presented would be unusual and be harder to maintain. Personally I would lean towards the ajax methods.
Struts2 along with the struts2-json-plugin makes creating json services very simple. Tiles is a nice system for reducing boiler plate. If ajax is used heavily the two really can compliment each other. You can make a lot of reusable ajax components, just be sure to not hard code the urls of actions. Always use the s:url tag and assign that to JS variables.
Try following code:
$('#footer').load('your/action/with/namespace');
i'm assuming your footer is with id footer, everytime you open a page, your footer action class will be called and the data can be fetched dynamically.
I'm building a page that has a search box that will populate a grid on the same page. There is also a button the user can select to bring up a "window" (JQuery UI "pop-up" in the same page) that lets the user configure said grid.
These are two separate forms but I don't want what was submitted as part of one to undo the other (so when the user submits to change the grid layout the search needs to re-run as well.
I'd rather not store things in session for this since that brings with it its own issues (search results may be large, shouldn't be saved when the page is re-entered later, etc.).
I've considered doing "one large form" (i.e. surrounding all the inputs) for the entire page that is backed by a form backing bean. I would then use which button is clicked to determine the action to take. There will eventually be other buttons on the page as well to add more functionality. This would be similar to how .NET (non-MVC) handles things.
I'm interested in how others may have solved similar challenges. Are there potential issues with my approach that I'm not seeing? Better ways that work with the framework?
What do you mean with:
but I don't want what was submitted as part of one to undo the other
. Are you referring to posting the form and loading the whole page, which in turn will "reset" the other form?
If that is the case I would still keep one page with two forms and make the posts using Ajax (as you may know jQuery makes this a breeze). Upon receiving a response for either call you will need to update the other form accordingly.
Note that you may still have your forms in two separate views if it helps keeping the code clean and then pull their html with Ajax calls into another view. But my point is that at the end I would still keep both in one page since it sounds like they depend on each other so updating one when the other changes may be easier this way,
Let me know if I misunderstood your question.
I have been developing an AJAX web application using GWT. I've read several blogs and forums about this question and left with no clear idea. I understand that GWT is an AJAX application, that supports only stand-alone web application. By stand-alone, I meant GWT to be a single web page that would suffice the user requirements. However the use case I have is pretty complex and I'm stuck in this use case that doesn't let me proceed.
My usecase(s) goes like this:
Usecase #1: There is an order entry form where user will enter a search string to search for a particular item. With GWT, I could display the result in a table (say celltable). However, when I click a column in the cellTable, I want the value of the column to be sent to the server and display another page that will display only the details of the selected column. I'm not sure how to accomplish this.
Usecase #2: Let's say the web application I develop is called "InventoryControl" and I have different requirements such as:
display Available stock
display Order stock
display Manufactured unit
and Using Java servlets, I could just type http://localhost/availableStock?stockId=1234 on my browser to get the "Display available stock" for the given stockId and then http://localhost:orderStock?stockId=1234 to get the "display order stock" and similarly "display manufactured unit". Is the same possible using GWT? i.e. when I type http://localhost/availableStock?stockId=1234, is it possible to read the parameter being passed and then display the corresponding page?
If these are not meant to be guaranteed by GWT, should I stick with Plain old JAVA servlets/JSP?
Thanks in advance.
Ashok - Please note, what filip suggests above does not require multiple "pages" in the sense of additional html host pages. You can build a panel holding your display of the details, and swap it into the rootpanel of your host in the onSuccess() of your rpc call. The GWT history mechanism allows you to assign anchors to these "places" and provide a mechanism to map these anchors to specific display classes in your code.
GWT already has a mechanism for handling multiple page applications. Have a look at Activities and Places. You can define each page as a place in your application, and use the GWT mechanism to go from place to place at any time. Using places also allows you to easily add tokens/query parameters to each "page", in an OO manner, without having to worry about populating/querying the URL directly. Have a good read of the link!
Working on a large Web app, I have houndresds of JSPs.
Each JSP includes (ONLY) a set of internal tags, for instance:
<AAA:INPUT value="bbb" state="<%=getPageState()"/>
This tag is rendered into an HTML input field, with a readonly/enabled state, based on the return value from getPageState().
This basically allows me to set the complete page as enabled/disabled from a single entry point.
I don't like this (mainly because it drives me away from writing the HTML I want and I need to maintain attributes for each HTML attribute I want), I know I can something similar on client side with JavaScript.
Are there other approachs to control the state of a complete JSP form in a single point on the web-server side?
The way I would go about this would be to convert the getPageState() method into a tag, and then use this tag within your custom tags. That way, you don't need to explicitly pass in the page-state on every invocation of your custom tag.
Of course, this means that you would have to modify all your custom tags to use this new tag, but I think that's better than having your code littered with explicit calls to get the page state. Not to mention, an opening for inconsistencies if a developer forgot to check the page state.
Also, now the decision as to how the element needs to be rendered rests in the custom tag itself (where it belongs).
The only problem I see is that now you have to make multiple (redundant) calls per element to get the page state, which is not that efficient. To get around this problem, you can have your custom tag (that gets the page state) set a page attribute, and have your custom tags inspect this page attribute to decide if the form element should be disabled or not (another way would be to create a variable with the scope AT_END).