Seam: programatically set s:decorate to invalid state - java

If you've used JBoss SEAM you've probably used the s:decorate tag. Quite a handy tag.
Anyway I need to a way to set its invalid state through java.
I've bound the xml tags to UIDecorate instance but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to set the 'invalid' state so that the decorator will apply the appropriate error CSS classes when the page is rendered.
Is it possible to do this? Am I going about it the wrong way? Note that in this case just writing a custom validator isn't an option (usually that would be the right way of doing it obviously).
Thanks!

Turns out the right way of doing this isn't by binding but simply by setting a message on the control using either StatusMessages.instance() or the injected FacesMessages.

Related

Getting database value to display it on JSP [duplicate]

We have a rather large application, with a great deal of dynamic content. Is there anyway to force struts to use a database for the i18n lookups, instead of properties files?
I'd be open for other ways to solve this as well, if anyone has ever done i18n with dynamic content.
I don't know of an easy plug-and-play solution for this, so you will probably have to implement it yourself -- plan on spending quite a bit of time just coming to grips with how the localization features of struts 2 (and XWork) are implemented. The key will probably be to provide your own implementation of com.opensymphony.xwork2.TextProvider (and tell struts to use it by providing a <bean> tag in struts.xml). I can think of at least two ways of fitting this into the overall architecture:
Have your TextProvider implementation access the database directly. In the spirit of YAGNI, this is probably the best way to start (you can always refactor later, if necessary).
Alternatively, you could place the database code into an implementation of Java's ResourceBundle interface, which is what XWork uses internally. To me this sounds like an even more design-heavy approach, but on the plus side there are some articles around describing how to do this.
No, there is no built-in way to have Struts2 load localized content from a database. You would need to write that yourself.
What are your requirements? Do you need for users to be able to dynamically change field prompts, error messages, etc.?
You may be able to do something like that by building a custom interceptor. You could have the interceptor read all the key value pairs from your database and inject them into the value stack. The only thing I am not sure about, not really having messed with i18n with struts before, is if the i18n stuff pulls that information from the value stack. If not, I am not sure if maybe you could do something else in the interceptor to load up the information.
Building a custom interceptor is not too terribly complicated. There are plenty of tutorial sites out there, including (brace for self promotion here) my blog: http://ddubbya.blogspot.com/2011/01/creating-custom-struts2-interceptors.html.
Use properties files just for static content, like labels, messages etc.
For dynamic content start with a database table that includes a language-code-id for every language you want to use. All the dynamic content entries that are already translated go with their respective language-code-id added to their primary key. If a translation is missing, you can program your application to fall back to your default language in order to make things easier until the right translation is present.
Let your users provide their contributions in the language they like and store it with the appropriate language-id. Someone should provide the translation to the other languages in order to make the contribution complete.
...
PRIMARY KEY (`subject_id`,`language_id`),
...

Best way of adding id's to html elements in GWT

I'm rather unexperienced in GWT, and I have large codebase with working project in this technology. My task refers to assigning id's to html elements witch will be used in automatic testing. We can't use some dynamically assigned id's because in automatic test we have to specify exact values of id's. My way for now was to use method ensureDebug(id), written by hand in code for specific elements.
I think that doing it this way mean that code will be more spaghetti-like, with mixed ensureDebug(id) methods usages there and here. I was thinking if there is any way of doing it that will be more manageable and cleaner than current. Is is maybe possible to use AOP? (I have never used AOP, so I don't know if it is any good idea, or possible in GWT) Or maybe other way than using ensureDebug?
You also can set the IDs for HTML elements like
element.setId("myId");
But this is as much spaghetti like as your approach adding the IDs in the code.
Another possibility would be to use an UiBinder and set the id there. With this approach you have all your ui elements of one view, which should have an id, at one place. With bootstrap for example it would look like this:
<b:TextBox ui:field="searchTextBox" b:id="search-text-box"/>
Like this you can access the field in your view-class via searchTextBox and the id search-text-boxis added to the HTML element (which you could also use for styling etc.)
We have faced same issue for our project while adding test automation. As per my knowledge unfortunately GWT doesn't support anything like AOP yet. So we have to follow any of the spaghetti-like approach only from one mentioned above by #mxlse or the one you are already following.
Based on my experience I can recommend you to create separate constant/property at client or server end. Use this file to save all your id's which you can share latter on with test team as well.

Struts2 internationalization using a database

We have a rather large application, with a great deal of dynamic content. Is there anyway to force struts to use a database for the i18n lookups, instead of properties files?
I'd be open for other ways to solve this as well, if anyone has ever done i18n with dynamic content.
I don't know of an easy plug-and-play solution for this, so you will probably have to implement it yourself -- plan on spending quite a bit of time just coming to grips with how the localization features of struts 2 (and XWork) are implemented. The key will probably be to provide your own implementation of com.opensymphony.xwork2.TextProvider (and tell struts to use it by providing a <bean> tag in struts.xml). I can think of at least two ways of fitting this into the overall architecture:
Have your TextProvider implementation access the database directly. In the spirit of YAGNI, this is probably the best way to start (you can always refactor later, if necessary).
Alternatively, you could place the database code into an implementation of Java's ResourceBundle interface, which is what XWork uses internally. To me this sounds like an even more design-heavy approach, but on the plus side there are some articles around describing how to do this.
No, there is no built-in way to have Struts2 load localized content from a database. You would need to write that yourself.
What are your requirements? Do you need for users to be able to dynamically change field prompts, error messages, etc.?
You may be able to do something like that by building a custom interceptor. You could have the interceptor read all the key value pairs from your database and inject them into the value stack. The only thing I am not sure about, not really having messed with i18n with struts before, is if the i18n stuff pulls that information from the value stack. If not, I am not sure if maybe you could do something else in the interceptor to load up the information.
Building a custom interceptor is not too terribly complicated. There are plenty of tutorial sites out there, including (brace for self promotion here) my blog: http://ddubbya.blogspot.com/2011/01/creating-custom-struts2-interceptors.html.
Use properties files just for static content, like labels, messages etc.
For dynamic content start with a database table that includes a language-code-id for every language you want to use. All the dynamic content entries that are already translated go with their respective language-code-id added to their primary key. If a translation is missing, you can program your application to fall back to your default language in order to make things easier until the right translation is present.
Let your users provide their contributions in the language they like and store it with the appropriate language-id. Someone should provide the translation to the other languages in order to make the contribution complete.
...
PRIMARY KEY (`subject_id`,`language_id`),
...

Extending struts 2 "property" data tag

We are currently developing a project with Struts2. We have a module on which we display a large amount of data on read-only fields from a group of beans via the "property" Struts 2 data tag (i.e. <s:property value="aBeanProperty" />) on a jsp file. In some cases most of the fields might come empty, so a blank is being displayed on screen.
Our customer is now requesting us to display default string (i.e. "N/A") whenever a property comes empty, so that it is displayed in place of the blank spaces currently shown.
We are looking for a way to achieve this in a clean and maintainable way. The 'property' tag comes with a 'default' attribute on which one can define a default value in cases when the accessed property comes as null. However, most of our properties are empty strings, therefore it does not work in our case.
Another solution we are thinking of is to define a base class for all of our beans, and define a util method which will validate if a string is null or empty and then return the default value. Then we would call this method from each bean getter. And yes this would be tiresome and kind of ugly :), therefore we are holding out on this one in case of a better solution.
Now, we have in mind a solution which we think would be the best but have not had luck on how implement it. We are planning on extending the 'property' tag some way, defining a new 'default' attribute so that besides working on null properties, it also do so on empty strings ("", " ", etc). Therefore we would only need to replace the original s:property tag with our new custom tag, and the desired result would be achieved without touching java code.
Do you have an idea on how to do this? Also, any other clever solution (maybe some sort of design pattern?) on how to default the values of a large amount of property beans are welcome too!
(Or maybe, even there might be some tag that does this already in Struts2??)
Thanks in advance.
Shorter version in case you don't want to read all of the above! :)
Currently Struts2 provides a property tag (<s:property value="someValue" />), it is used to display the content of a value, e.g. a String variable on an Action class. This tag contains an attribute called "default" where you can define a default value to be displayed IF the variable is set to NULL, e.g. you can set it to display "N/D" for these values.
We now need to do the same, but that it also works on empty Strings ("", " ", etc), not only on nulls. We plan on extending this tag so that we have our own (maybe something like <s:propertyEmpty value="someValue" />) and accomplish this behavior. Can you guide how to accomplish this?
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Interesting. I believe you are on the right track.
Only that I would try to extend/modify the property tag so that the new behaviour is explicitly set in the jsp code. I mean, I would not like that each in the web app automatically gets the new behaviour, because perhaps there are some bean properties for which I want the original struts2 behaviour.
I would prefer to have a new tag nane (eg: ... or something shorter) or a new attribute (eg )
Perhaps this helps: http://bodez.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/customising-struts2-jsp-tags/

Apache beehive and localizing default pager for DataGrid

I am trying to localize strings created by Apache Beehive and netui default pager.
I'd like to translate language of this output.
Page 1 of 3 First / Previous Next / Last
My .jsp code looks something like this
<netui-data:dataGrid name="searchResultsGrid" dataSource="pageInput.someData">
<netui-data:header>
...
</netui-data:header>
<netui-data:rows>
...
</netui-data:rows>
<netui-data:configurePager pagerFormat="firstPrevNextLast" pageAction="refresh" pageSize="10"
disableDefaultPager="false" />
</netui-data:dataGrid>
I already found keys I should use in translation, but how I configure message properties file(s) that the pager should use?
As far as I can tell, IDataGridMessageKeys is merely an exposed internal interface, not really meant to be used by end-users. As a guess, I'd wager they had to expose it as public from within that package in order for other packages to be able to use it, and couldn't find another way (with their build scheme) to safely pass it to the rest of the code.
(Of course, I might be wrong. I'll try rooting through the source some more.)

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