Hi,
We'd like to make use of JSP's and I'm sure we do not have an unusual business case but we can't see how we can due to the following technical challenges. I'm sure there is an expert who has better experience on this, can you advise us?
The challenge:
We have an object (say a car object) that has properties (the driver is) with values (person objects). The car object may have other properties (has passengers) with no values at all. We want to display to a web browser user the car object.
The car object belongs to the car class so we know all the properties the car should have. It is from that class we are able to build up an XHTML using a div for the object with a table containing rows for each property. Then we need to map the object's property values into the cells of the table. There may be mulitple values (i.e. 4 passengers), and we want to display each value using a div with an image (to allow drag and drop).
I can see several ways of solving this.
1) The car object is a class and has a method parse which returns it's own XHTML logic. The car object has a hashmap containing the properties and each property has a hasmap containing the values. For example:
object
parse
<DIV>
<TABLE>
loop through properties and parse each one
</TABLE>
</DIV>
property
parse
<TR>
<TD>label</TD>
<TD>
loop through values and parse each one
</TD>
</TR>
property value
parse
<DIV>
<IMG src="..">
</DIV>
This builds up the final example XHTML for the object:
<DIV id="car">
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD>p_driver</TD>
<TD>
<DIV>
<IMG src=".Bob.">
</DIV>
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>p_passengers</TD>
<TD>
<DIV>
<IMG src=".Fred.">
</DIV>
<DIV>
<IMG src=".Wilma.">
</DIV>
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
</DIV>
2) Do the same as above and build an XML instead of XHTML. Then parse using XSLT:
<Object id="car">
<TABLE>
<Prop>p_driver</Prop>
<ObjectValue>.Bob.</ObjectValue>
<Prop>p_passengers</Prop>
<ObjectValue>.Fred.</ObjectValue>
<ObjectValue>.Wilma.</ObjectValue>
</Object>
3) Since we may want to present the same objects in different formats depending on the user i.e. we may want to use a column for each property instead of rows (transpose the table). We like the idea of seperating the generation of the presentation (XHTML) logic from the data preparation stage (reading both the class, object, and properties). JSP's would be perfect for this. But we would like to modularise the JSP so that for example the property values are their own reusable JSP's. In this case we would need to pull together many JSP's to produce the final XHTML. One way to do this (but surely not the best way by far) is for the servlet to read the JSP (or file based XHTML definition) and then dynamically build up the XHTML using the JSP's as templates (this sounds too much like XSLT). Otherwise how would you do the following:
Define 3 JSP's:
Object_Container.JSP
Property.JSP
Objecy_Value.JSP
The Object container would be used for the car. Then it would need to read the servlet bean and loop through the properties, and then insert the property jsp for each one found. The property JSP would then need to read the servlet and loop through the objct_value JSP for each value found.
4) Use JSF. We want more control on the gui components that JSF will allow, so this is not an option.
So in the end we can't see how to do option 3 in a sensible way so for the time being we've stuck with option 1. Option 2 may be an option but we're concerned about performance and first like to exhaust the JSP option. Any tips, traps, or insults for our stupidity...?
Brendan
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Brendan Laing ]
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Brendan Laing ]
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Brendan Laing ]
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Brendan Laing ]
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]
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