The Vault
What is the vault ?
The vault contains lots of unsorted problems, snippets, remarks and ideas, mostly found in posts in the WebWork Forum. You can think of this page as a place to store content before it is analyzed and put in the official docs, cookbook or FAQ. It's raw, unpolished, and can contain typos. If you can't find it in the docs, you can take a look in here (or use the search in the forum). It also gives an idea of what problems ww users encounter in their search for the holy grail.
Feel free to 'take' issues from this page and move them to an appropriate page.
Under construction
Tryout - if this is a bad idea, feel free to tell me so. It would be great if we could have some sort of notifier in the forum to inform us when an interesting post arrives.
Migration to 2.2
Note about upgrading your WW tags to 2.2
Just a quick fyi that caused issues for us... In 2.2 when extending UIBean evaluateExtraParams() no longer takes parameters. (Our parameters were not working until we realized that evaluateExtraParams was not being invoked due to the change.) In 2.1 evaluateExtraParams was passed the stack IIRC.
Not sure if this is documented anywhere but it caused us quite a headache when migrating from 2.1 to 2.2.
Where did the velocity templates go ?
checking cvs log, it seems that Pat has removed it with comment as follows:
removing velocity macro implementations - they are so old and out of date now it will cause more harm than good keeping them around
Best practices
Should I make an action or rather link to a .jsp page ?
If you put an action configuration in your xwork.xml but don't put an action
class attribute, it will default to using the ActionSupport class, which
just returns SUCCESS.
Migration to Spring IoC
How can we migrate ServletRequestAware, ServletResponseAware and ValidationAware to Spring bean definitions?
I tink just the normal way would work. The action will now be created by spring, and if the ServletConfigInterceptor is in the stack and the action implementation implement those interface, webwork should set the appropriate methods.
Freemarker, Velocity, JSP
How to catch Freemarker exceptions (the ugly big yellow pages)
FreeMarker delegates exception handling to so-called TemplateExceptionHandlers. By default the HTML_DEBUG_HANDLER is used (this one generates the yellow error page), but you can easily specify a different exception handler by using the setTemplateExceptionHandler method of your configuration object. FM provides some simple handlers you can use, in your case I recommend the RETHROW_HANDLER (
http://freemarker.org/docs/api/freemarker/template/TemplateExceptionHandler.html
).
My ww:include actions aren't processed
Did you declare the ww tag library in your includes ? If I'm not mistaken, jsp includes work different from ww includes (ww process the pages before including them).
I'm using ww:urlHelper in combination with the c:out tag, but it won't work !
if the url with & is used in the value attribute it will not work properly unless the escapeXml is set to false.
Validation
How to disable validation on the first page load (to show a in input form)?
If you define your own stack you can exclude methods from validation by adding the excludeMethods param to both Validation and Workflow. Assuming you are using the defaultStack the the methods input, back and cancel will be ignored. Change default to action!input and declare the input method to return INPUT.
When using clientside validation, DWR states it gets No Data From Server
When using firefox if a user has focus on an input control and then clicks the submit button i get a DWR error stating that there was no data from the server.
I searched around on this group and did not see a solution. Via the DWR mailing list I found a post fromi Joe Walker stating that a workaround was to register a custom DWR error handler ..
http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/browser/engine/errors