Carl's Weblog

Smarter ActionForms

"Why do my ActionForms have to have the same properties as my domain object?" is one of the complaints about ActionForms that you usually hear from WebWork users. My reply to this question is "They don't." My ActionForms all 'have a' instance of the domain object as a property. This allows me to easily create the forms using the nested taglib, which isn't really necessary since the dot notation is painless. I have been told that this strategy does not work so well with Hibernate, but it does work with iBatis, Jaxor and probably Torque.