Question

I am having a method to get the countryname list from the database and a method to fetch statenames for any provided countryname. But not sure how to link both for country and state.

    <sx:autocompleter list="countrynames" name="employee.countryname" value="%{employee.countryname}" label="%{getText('label.countryname')}"/>

    <sx:autocompleter list="statenames" name="employee.statename" value="%{employee.statename}" label="%{getText('label.statename')}"/>

I am having arraylists with name ‘countrynames’ and similarly ‘statenames’ but not sure how to get statenames dynamically generated based on the selection of a country in the above country list and how can i connect that fetched countryname to the method to call explicitly the list of states in the country.

Answer 1

A few suggestion i would like to give you

1. Struts2 Dojo plugin is not more in development and is deprecated so i will suggest you not to go for it else you can use plain DOJO with struts2.

There is a Jquery plugin which is in active use and will provide you most of the functionality which you are looking for, have a look at A_simple_Doubleselect_with_Topics.

I am not a big admirer of this plugin as it limit us a lot in implementation though it provides us a lot of good widgets and features

my suggestion is to use following approach

1. Add Struts2-JSON plugin so as to send back JSOn data from action.
2. User simple Jquery to send data to server and get back JSON and with help of Jquery JSON parsing technique fill the second drop down.

Add a on-change event to your first drop down and create a function where you will fill the second drop down

function fill statenames(countryID)
var formInput='country='+countryID;     
$.getJSON('search/getStateNames',formInput,function(data) {
    $("#employee.statename  option:first").val("-1").text("Please select state");
    $('.result').html('' + data.states + '');
    $.each(data.states ,function(index, value){
    var stateid= document.getElementById("state");
    var option=new Option(value,value);
   try{
     stateid.add(option);
    }
    catch(e){
      stateid.appendChild(option);
   }
});
            });

Action Class

public class StateListAction extends ActionSupport{

   private String country;
   // getter and setter
  private List<String> states;
   //getter and setter

  public String getStateList(){
    states=fillStatebasedonCountry(country);
    return SUCCESS;
  }
}