Working with Tabular Data using Struts Framework

There are many scenarios where we work with tabular data. Sometimes we not only display tabular data but also make it editable hence have to be saved and updated.
This article talks about how to do the above in struts framework.

Class Diagram

In the above diagram, A tableForm has indexed property rows and Row consists of indexed property column. There are static variables number of rows in TableForm and number of columns in Row. Before we display the table in a jsp we set the size of the rows and columns updating the static variables.

TableForm.setRowsize(2);
Row.setColsize(2);

In struts-config.xml, we configure the TableAction & TableForm:

<?xml version=”1.0" encoding=”ISO-8859–1" ?>

<!DOCTYPE struts-config PUBLIC
“-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 1.0//EN”
“http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/struts-config_1_0.dtd">
<form-beans>

<form-bean name=”tableForm”
type=”TableForm”/>
</form-beans>

<! — ========== Action Mapping Definitions ============================== →
<action-mappings>
<action path=”/table”
type=”TableAction”
name=”tableForm”
scope=”request”
validate=”false”>
<forward name=”success” path=”/Bean.jsp”/>
<forward name=”failure” path=”/Table.jsp”/>
</action>

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</action-mappings>

</struts-config>

The Table.jsp will access the indexed properties to display and update:

<%@ taglib uri=”/WEB-INF/struts-html.tld” prefix=”html” %>
<html:html locale=”true”>
<html:form action=”/table” >
<center>
<table>
<tr>
<td> <html:text property=”rows[0].columns[0].value” /> </td>
<td> <html:text property=”rows[0].columns[1].value” /></td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td> <html:text property=”rows[1].columns[0].value” /> </td>
<td> <html:text property=”rows[1].columns[1].value” /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
<center> <html:submit property=”submit” value=”Submit”/> </center>
</html:form>
</html:html>

When the data is submitted and updated, the Table Action will be able to access the tabular values as shown below:

public ActionForward perform(ActionMapping mapping,
ActionForm form,
HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
throws IOException, ServletException {

TableForm aForm = (TableForm) form;

System.out.println(aForm.getRows(0).getColumns(0).getValue());
System.out.println(“00 processed”);
System.out.println(aForm.getRows(0).getColumns(1).getValue());
System.out.println(aForm.getRows(1).getColumns(0).getValue());
System.out.println(aForm.getRows(1).getColumns(1).getValue());
}

The code can be downloaded from the github repository : https://github.com/bhagvank/strutstable