Question

I have a Javabean with a date_observed field. Now I am trying to create a form where a user can search for entries between a start and end date.

Should I create another Javabean that extends this bean to have a start and end date field so that I can populate these field from request parameter?

I’d like to cleanly pass a bean to my Dao for SQL string generation and also have a way to do form validation if they enter incorrect date format.

Typically I would do

public void processDate_observed(HttpServletRequest request, Comment comment) {
    String _date = FormUtil.getFieldValue(request, FIELD_DATE_OBSERVED);
    if (!"".equals(_date) && _date != null) {
        try {
            Date date = DateUtil.parse(_date);
            com.setDate_observed(date);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            setError(FIELD_DATE_OBSERVED, e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

But my Comment Javabean does not have fields for start_date and end_date

And for dao.search(comment)

    public List<Evaluatee> search(Comment comment) {
   SQL = ".... where date_observed > ? AND date_observed <= ?
         ps.setDate(1, comment.EXTENDED FIELD???)
         ps.setDate(2, comment.EXTENDED FIELD???)
   ...
    }

What is the best practice here? Creat a whole new Javabean, extend my original bean or pass along the two date fields to Dao? But then how do you pass form validation back to form if I don’t have the dates in a bean?

Answer 1

Is a good practice that in your DAO class you have a serch method with a start and end date as parameters.

public List<Evaluatee> search(String startDate, String endDate) {
///CODE GOES HERE
}

It’s not necessary that the DAOs needs to have a Comment object as an argument, the rule is that for each table of the data base need to be a class with the same fields as in the table.