Structs Interview Questions and Answers

Can you give me a simple example of using the requiredif Validator rule?
First off, there's an even newer Validator rule called
validwhen, which is almost certainly what you want to use,
since it is much easier and more powerful.
It will be available in the first release after 1.1 ships.
The example shown below could be coded with validwhen as:

<form name="medicalStatusForm">

<field
property="pregnancyTest" depends="validwhen">
<arg0 key="medicalStatusForm.pregnancyTest.label"/>
<var>
<var-name>test</var-name>
<var-value>((((sex == 'm') OR (sex == 'M'))
AND (*this* == null)) OR (*this* != null))</test>
</var>
</field>

Let's assume you have a medical information form
with three fields,
sex, pregnancyTest, and testResult. If sex is 'f' or 'F',
pregnancyTest is required. If pregnancyTest is not blank,
testResult is required. The entry in your validation.xml
file would look like this:

<form name="medicalStatusForm">

<field
property="pregnancyTest" depends="requiredif">
<arg0 key="medicalStatusForm.pregnancyTest.label"/>
<var>
<var-name>field[0]</var-name>
<var-value>sex</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldTest[0]</var-name>
<var-value>EQUAL</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldValue[0]</var-name>
<var-value>F</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>field[1]</var-name>
<var-value>sex</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldTest[1]</var-name>
<var-value>EQUAL</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldValue[1]</var-name>
<var-value>f</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldJoin</var-name>
<var-value>OR</var-value>
</var>
</field>

<field
property="testResult" depends="requiredif">
<arg0 key="medicalStatusForm.testResult.label"/>
<var>
<var-name>field[0]</var-name>
<var-value>pregnancyTest</var-value>
</var>
<var>
<var-name>fieldTest[0]</var-name>
<var-value>NOTNULL</var-value>
</var>
</field>
</form>

When is the best time to validate input?
This is an excellent question. Let's step back a second and think about a typical mid to large size application. If we start from the back end and work toward the view we have:
1) Database: Most modern databases are going to validate for required fields, duplicate records, security constraints, etc.
2) Business Logic: Here you are going to check for valid data relationships and things that make sense for the particular problem you are triing to solve.
... This is where struts comes into the picture, by now the system should be pretty well bulletproof. What we are going to do is make validation friendlier and informative. Rember it is OK to have duplicate validations...
3) ActionErrors validate(ActionMapping map, HttpServletRequest req) is where you can do your validation and feed back to the view, information required to correct any errors. validate is run after the form has been reset and after the ActionForm properties have been set from corresponding view based input. Also remember you can turn validation off with validate="false" in the action mapping in the struts-config.xml. This is done by returning an ActionErrors collection with messages from your ApplicationResources.properties file.
Here you have access to the request so you can see what kinds of action is being requested to fine tune your validations. The <html:error> tag allows you to dump all errors on your page or a particular error associated with a particular property. The input attribute of the struts-config.xml action allows you to send validation errors to a particular jsp / html / tile page.
4) You can have the system perform low level validations and client side feedback using a ValidatorForm or its derivatives. This will generate javascript and give instant feedback to the user for simple data entry errors. You code your validations in the validator-rules.xml file. A working knowledge of regular expressions is necessary to use this feature effectively.

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