POJOsToForms

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Send your POJOs to the UI rather than converting them to ActionForms first.

By this, I mean to say that I'd like to retrieve and display POJOs on the UI, and then capture their information (as ActionForms) when saving the form. The reason I want to do this is because of Hibernate's Lazy Loading feature and formatting Dates. Basically, Hibernate allows you to load children of an object lazily (i.e. resumes of a User), when the getResumes() method is called.

The issue I'm seeing right now with lazily-loaded properties is that they're loaded when using BeanUtils.copyProperties() is called. I use this to convert POJOs to ActionForms, and consequently the getResumes() method is called. However, I don't want this. I'd rather the getResumes() method is called when I call it in my code (rather than by a 3rd party conversion utility). Therefore, I'm thinking that passing the POJO to the view is the best solution. Because I'm using the open-session-in-view pattern, those lazy collections are still available while the JSP is being rendered.

This solves another issue too. It's nice to format dates on the UI, and you need a real date on your form to do this, rather than a String value of a date that's already been converted.

One issue might be with checkboxes, but I can just use the Form for that, right? I haven't tried this yet, but I wanted to write my thoughts down and stir up some discussion on it beforehand.

You might also be interested in my blog entry on the subject.

Related Pages:

• ValueObjectInForm