Today I was doing this thing with Spring:
Have a page with a form and a chance to choose one item related to the form.
If you push "Choose item" the app will save somehow what you typed in the form, go to another page, let you choose the thing.
When you are back to the form it's filled with what you wrote before going to the other page, plus the item chosen.
Seems easy, but you have to take into account that for some stupid reason the user could open the page where you choose the item (maybe because of a bookmark, or because he pressed the back button 10 times to play). You know what I mean. I tried many ways, mainly based on HttpSession... I don't like any of those. None of them seems elegant. I was even thinking of using a hidden form in the other page, but given that it is not unique to this "flow" (I mean you can go to the item choose page from others as well), I will have to worry about conflicts and so on.
So what would be the preferred way for you? Suggestions?
Go around the problem instead of solving it. You can use a modal javascript div popup where the user can pick the item she wants. The contents of this div can be loaded via ajax (separate Spring MVC controller called with Http GET). Once the selection has been made, you close the popup (hide the div) and copy the value into the original form. Done.
No need to store the state anywhere.
I suggest Spring Web Flow.
Spring Web Flow compliments the Spring MVC.
Here is link to Spring Web Flow Demo
Related
Does anyone know how I can get the same pop up via a button located on different pages (.JSF)?
That is, there is a button "add file" which then opens a pop up with a form where the user adds information about the file. As the pop up is always the same I was thinking of using declarative components. However, I do not understand how.
You can create a taskflow which will contain your page with upload form, and then reuse it on other pages as af:region. Check out this great post with an example how to do it.
I might think about three different ways to achieve this:
1) As #Pregrad said, you can create a Bounded Task Flow and expose this BTF as region (or dynamic region) in every page you need it as a popUp window (recommended if you are using transactions)
2) You can create page templates, put the af:popUp in them and apply the template for each page (recommended if you already have templates, and you need the popUp for each page on your application)
3) You can put the af:popUp component on each page you need it, and then call it programmatically. This approach may be would give you more control on the popUp behaviour but would require you to handle it manually.
The approach you should use does really depend on your needs.
Basically, what pros/cons are there to using multiple forms in the same web page vs one form with multiple submit buttons? Any difference at?
Ah? Multiple submit buttons on a single form will all submit the entire form when pressed... there's really no advantage to having multiples, unless you're overriding how the submit process works so each button only submits it's own area. In this case they'd probably not even by submit buttons, but just buttons with sum JS code to handle submission.
Multiple forms are discrete spaces of data collection, each can have it's own submit button... but only one of them can be sent at a time (and depending on the browser you may loose what's in the other forms).
Neither approach is particularly good from a user interface perspective since it'll be confusing.
The real question is, what are you trying to do that prompts you to ask this?
The two behave differently and there are good reasons to choose one over the other.
Multiple Forms on a page allow you to send data to two different locations. A common example is to have an input form as the main focus of a page going to one location, and a search form that appears as part of the generic header/footer. These both go to separate locations and submit only the HTML form elements within their appropriate <form/>
Multiple submit buttons offer you the ability to give different purpose to a submitted set of form elements. E.g. One form may have a bunch of submit buttons all with name attributes, meaning you can add conditional logic on the server side to say: "Continue", go " Back" or even "Save for later". All reference only the form elements within it's parent tag.
Two side notes are: 1) You can't nest forms. 2) JavaScript can change this default behaviour if you wanted it to. :)
Edit: with reference to a comment you made, if you wanted to do without JavaScript (a wise choice while it's not needed), you could do some careful thinking and keep POSTing the form to itself. Each time checking which form button has been clicked (top tip, give them all the same name and you can just switch case through it) and do whatever you need to do, including performing validation. E.g: When they hit "add media", you'd save the media uploaded and return a reference of it to the screen as a hidden input. The user can then continue to add things to the other boxes and when complete, hit your save button, at which point you do all the main saving work and make sure you tie the uploaded file to it as well.
You effectively keep adding stuff to their screen until they hit the save and then you perform a save method and redirect to a thank you page (or whatever logic suits your scenario). :)
All fields in a form are sent when one of their submit button is clicked. It's for you to see if you need all fields or not.
I have a 3 steps forms where I bind for each step on a ViewModel that has DataAnnotation. Everything works fine except that when I click on my "previous" button, the validation gets called and, if there's missing values, the user has to fill all required fields. If I go with an action link, then the data won't be persisted. What I'm looking for here is a way to save my values without calling the validation. I also consider using cookies but I don't think that it's the best way of doing it.
Any ideas or suggestions?
I use separate models for each step of my wizard pages. I also make sure that the previous clicks do not hit ModelState.IsValid which is what triggers the validation check.
I store the results of each step using session state stored in SQL Server. You can also use hidden variables but I didn't like that solution.
Add a comment if you need more detail or show some code for us to see.
Ok after lots of searching I found out a solution for having a Wizard like multiple forms with previous and next buttons that won't call the client validation from Data Annotation and MicrosoftMvcValidation.js. I found this post : jQuery Validation plugin: disable validation for specified submit buttons witch simply add a class to the submit button but it was not working for me so I look again and found this one : http://forums.asp.net/p/1622628/4165648.aspx witch has a solution working for me in javascript : document.getElementById("someButton").disableValidation = true; I would prefer a jQuery solution so I could do something with the class attribute of my buttons but it's working for today and I've spent too mutch time on this.
Hope it helps some else who's trying to do a "Cancel" button or a Wizard like forms in MVC2 and want's to post the form to the controller so he needs to clear the validation.
In GWT, I would like to do something like a form submission that takes me to a new page, with new style sheet and new static elements, and when I get there, be able to extract the values of GWT variables still in GWT. In other words, I want to do most of the form processing on the client side instead of sending it to a servlet to be processed and sent back. Is that possible? Would FormPanel allow me to do that? How do I access the contents of the form fields in GWT on the new page?
I'm not sure I'm getting the right picture here, but I see several possibilities:
Pass the variables in the url like example.com/myform#create/param1/param2 or any other format you want, then read it using the History class
Use something like this - create an iframe from GWT (maybe put it in Lightbox or something similar), populate it the way you want using the current state of the app, and when the user is finished, he'll just close the (Lightbox) frame and get back to the main application
You could also pass around data in a "hidden" way (no visible data in the url or even through POST) using the window.name hack - there's even a sample implementation for GWT to get you started
ATM, I prefer the second option, since it goes best with the whole no refresh, same page, one app, GWT thing :) That is, unless I'm getting the wrong picture and you want to do something else.
GWT is really meant to be used for the whole application, where "pages" are replaced by application state and URL fragments, and "form submission" is replaced by AJAX calls.
If you want to validate form fields, this can easily be done with regular JS or a library like jQuery.
I'm not sure it I get you right either, but for what I'm receiving, having a new page to process the form is not the optimal design. The reason been that you might have to write different GWT app for that which mean overheads, and creating new window (or tab) will move the user's attention away from where they are. Why not using another page WITHIN gwt to process the form with tab panel or hidden panel?
I have a page where a user enters data and hits a "save" button.
The data gets saved to the db, and I want the page to refrsh itself to reflect the new data in the db.
I am using a managed bean, how do i get the page to refresh on its own?
There are two options which come to my mind:
Make use of JSF navigation rules
Use the rendered attributes
ad 1)
Define a page to which you'll navigate to after hitting "save".
For doing that, your action for actually saving the data to DB will go into the method defined as an actionListener or, if you want to make your next page depending on the outcome of the saving process, as action.
Navigation rules will be defined in faces-config.xml
If no navigation rule matches a given action, the current page will be redisplayed (although from the experience i made this refresh is different to a common HTML refresh).
ad 2)
If you've some lists or a data table on the same page set to a model in your bean, changes will automatically be displayed except you're using the immediate keyword set to true on your save button.
Additionally you might consider a panel with a content of your choice which has the rendered property set to a boolean in your bean, which will be triggered within the saving process and therefore let the content be displayed only after hitting save.
You can make use of the AJAX push feature of IceFaces. This initializes a re-render of the client.
The recommended (and easiest) way is to use the SessionRender API in your managed bean:
SessionRenderer.addCurrentSession("myGroup");
SessionRenderer.render("myGroup");
Consult the Icefaces developers guide for more information.
It depends on how you do it.
When you click the button, the JSF life-cycle is kicked off, if you kick off the save to the database within the button's action, whatever values you update in your manage bean should be reflected in the page automagically. The JSF lifecycle does this for you automatically and icefaces can do it using the AJAX bridge so you won't be required to do a page reload.
If you're doing work asynchronously, you'll need to use the Push API icefaces provides you. To kick off the life-cycle from the server end.