Blogging Roller

It's a nice coincidence that the very week that I have to dig into the Struts Validator, two articles appear by Erik Hatcher on XDoclet and Struts. After reading these articles and browsing Matt Raible's AppFuse project code, I was able to fit the pieces together and get XDoclet to generate the right struts-config.xml and validation.xml entries for my form beans. Below are links to Erik's articles and some other resources I found useful in investigating Struts Validation:

• Erik Hatcher: Form Validation and Action Mapping
• Erik Hatcher: Exploit XDoclet's Struts Capabilities
• Matt Raible: AppFuse project
• <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20030226#struts_validator_validating_two_fields"> Matt Raible: How To Add a TwoFields Validator
• Struts website: Struts Validator Guide
• Chuck Cavaness's Using the Validator Framework with Struts

Seems like everytime I try to use XDoclet, I have to tweak one of the XDoclet template files to work around a bug. This time was no exception. I found that XDoclet would only generate the right entries in struts-config.xml if my form beans extend ActionForm, but to use the Struts Validator, I need my form beans to extend ValidatorForm. The only way I found to get around this problem was to copy struts_config_xml.xdt out of the XDoclet xdoclet-apache-module-1.2b4.jar file and to change the first forAllClasses like so (my change in bold):

  <!-- ========== Form Bean Definitions ============== -->
  <form-beans>

   <XDtClass:forAllClasses type="org.apache.struts.validator.ValidatorForm">
   <XDtClass:forAllClassTags tagName="struts:form" superclasses="false">
    <form-bean
      name="<XDtClass:classTagValue tagName="struts:form" paramName="name"/>"
      type="<XDtClass:fullClassName/>" />
   </XDtClass:forAllClassTags>
  </XDtClass:forAllClasses>

I believe there needs to be one of those forAllClassses loops for each type of form: ActionForm, ValidatorForm, and ValidatorActionForm. This does not appear in the current XDoclet CVS for <a href= "http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/xdoclet/xdoclet/modules/apache/src/xdoclet/modules/apache/struts/resources/struts_config_xml.xdt?rev=1.11&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup"> struts_config_xml.xdt. My chance to get a patch in?