DTO and ActionForm

[Kris Bal]

In my application which uses Struts,
I have some Data Transfer Objects(DTOs) which are all complex DTOs (ie it contains some objects also).

what I populate in the ActionForm is all strings input from the user.How to populate the DTOs from the ActionForms.
I think i cannot use BeanUtils.copyProperties(actionForm,dto) directly to copy the properties from my action form to DTO as the DTO contains some objects also.(These objects inside DTO has to be built from the data input by the user).

How to achieve this?

Also in the reverse,when displaying the details to user how to copy the properties from the DTO to action form?

[Brent Sterling]

I write this code manually and put the methods in my action form. It is a bit of a pain but it works.

- Brent

[H Ritwick]

For BeanUtils copy to handle non registered converters, you can write custom converters. This had worked for most of the cases for me. But still after bean utils copy, I was also doing few explicit object creations and setting them to dto.

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/api/org/apache/commons/beanutils/converters/package-summary.html

http://www.javaranch.com/journal/200406/BeanUtilsDigesterAndTypeConversion.html