Question

I’m building a page that has a search box that will populate a grid on the same page. There is also a button the user can select to bring up a “window” (JQuery UI “pop-up” in the same page) that lets the user configure said grid.

These are two separate forms but I don’t want what was submitted as part of one to undo the other (so when the user submits to change the grid layout the search needs to re-run as well.

I’d rather not store things in session for this since that brings with it its own issues (search results may be large, shouldn’t be saved when the page is re-entered later, etc.).

I’ve considered doing “one large form” (i.e. surrounding all the inputs) for the entire page that is backed by a form backing bean. I would then use which button is clicked to determine the action to take. There will eventually be other buttons on the page as well to add more functionality. This would be similar to how .NET (non-MVC) handles things.

I’m interested in how others may have solved similar challenges. Are there potential issues with my approach that I’m not seeing? Better ways that work with the framework?

Answer 1

What do you mean with:

but I don’t want what was submitted as part of one to undo the other

. Are you referring to posting the form and loading the whole page, which in turn will “reset” the other form?

If that is the case I would still keep one page with two forms and make the posts using Ajax (as you may know jQuery makes this a breeze). Upon receiving a response for either call you will need to update the other form accordingly.

Note that you may still have your forms in two separate views if it helps keeping the code clean and then pull their html with Ajax calls into another view. But my point is that at the end I would still keep both in one page since it sounds like they depend on each other so updating one when the other changes may be easier this way,

Let me know if I misunderstood your question.