Using the DynaActionForm Class
Using
the ActionForm
class has many advantages over
performing the functionality yourself in the
Action
class or some set of helper utility
classes. Because the behavior the ActionForm
class
provides is needed in nearly every web application and often many
times in the same application, using the framework to perform the
work can really reduce the development time and your frustration
level. However, there are a few very important downsides to using
ActionForm
s.
The biggest problem with using
ActionForm
s is the sheer number of classes that it
can add to a project. Even if you share ActionForm
definitions across many pages, the additional classes make it more
difficult to manage and maintain a project. This is why some
developers create a single ActionForm
and
implement the properties for all of the HTML forms within it. The
problem with this approach, of course, is that combining the fields
into one class makes it a point of contention on a project that has
more than just a few developers.
Another major liability is the requirement to define the properties
in the ActionForm
that need to be captured from
the HTML form. If a property is added or removed from the HTML form,
the ActionForm
class may need to be modified and
recompiled.
For these reasons, a new type of ActionForm
, which
is dynamic in nature and allows you to avoid having to create
concrete ActionForm
classes for your application,
was added to the framework. The dynamic ActionForm
is ...
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