use same action in different pages in struts2 - struts2

I have 2 pages, all having the same search function, so I want use the same action name for 2 page search. The problem is when validation failed, how to define result='input' back to different pages?
Is there any solution to this? Or do we have to define different actions for different pages?

Related

How to display a different breadcrumb title for the same controller + action method?

I have a Home controller and a Business controller. The business controller has a few action methods on it: Search, Create, Update, Delete.
On my home page I have links to the Search and Create views on the Business controller. The Search view also has a link to the Create view.
I want the bread crumb to look like the following when Create is accessed from the home page:
Home > Create
…and i want it to look like the following when Create is accessed from the Search page:
Home > Business > Create
In both the cases the controller/action method is the same, but the breadcrumb I want displayed is different. Is it possible to do this using MvcSiteMapProvider?
As far as I know this is not supported out of the box. Meaning that you have to adapt the HtmlHelper template to you needs, see https://github.com/maartenba/MvcSiteMapProvider/wiki/HtmlHelper-functions.
The only way this can be done is if you add some information to your route to tell one request apart from the other, then you can configure 2 different nodes to create both breadcrumb trails.
I have a working example of how to do that on my blog: http://www.shiningtreasures.com/post/2013/08/10/mvcsitemapprovider-4-seo-features#canonical-tag. Make sure to check out the code download.

is it possible to nest one form inside another in razor?

I put the begin/end form statement in the layout page so that I don't have to repeat it on several pages. Below's a simplified version of the code.
#using(Html.BeginForm())
{
#RenderBody()
<input type = "submit" name = "nextButton" value = "Next-->" />
}
Things are working well. Unfortunately, I have a page that has several "Delete" buttons. I want to generate a form for each delete button so that it can send the id of the item to delete back to the controller.
Can I do that knowing that there's already another form on top of that?
Thanks for helping
As Mrchief says, the the HTML specs forbid nested forms. Since MVC just generates standard HTML, you have to work withinn the framework of the spec.
Why not just create two master layouts, and use the form based one most of the time, but use one without a form when you need more control over the embedded forms.
This is the why you should really only use forms exactly where they are needed, not just everywhere.
Do note that nesting of forms is not allowed as per the W3 specs
Every form must be enclosed within a FORM element. There can be
several forms in a single document, but the FORM element can't be
nested.
There is an interseting article about caveats of nesting forms here.
In this case, it is better to generate a form for each button instead of having a single form.
ASP.Net web forms restricted you from having multiple forms on the page by using runat=server attribute (and the framework ensuring that only one per page was allowed). MVC forms are pure HTML so you can have multiple of them.

Using MVC Routes as Shortcodes

We have been trying to implement shortcodes on an ASP.NET MVC web app that allow users to uniquely invoke a given article/page using an assigned short code.
For e.g.: www.mysite.com/power would map to an actual URL: www.mysite.com/Power/Home/.
I have created various routes throughout the site that map these shortcodes to various actions and controllers within the application. From a shortcode/route point of view, everything is working great.
I, however, noticed a couple of interesting things. I have hyperlinks that I use Url.Action method to generate the URL pointing pages. Many of these pages also have short codes associated with them. For e.g.: I have a link that says:
Go to Power page
This is a page that also has the previously mentioned short-code assigned to it. When I use Url.Action, I ideally expect it to create a link as /Power/Home/Index or /Power/Home, but since I also have a route constraint mapped to it, it now generates the link as /power.
Is there a way I can just use the actual link URL when generating links? I only want short-codes when I am sending out emails etc. I want the site to generate actual URLs.
This may or may not be possible, but I wanted to see if there were any ideas out there that I could use.
Anup
Index and Home are likely defined in your route table as defaults for the Action and Controller element. When you generate the Url it wont include the defaults if they aren't needed.
You could write your own Action overload or helper, which would allow you to take more direct control of the generated URL or action link. You could approach it from two different ways: 1) a helper to generate short-code specific urls and links, and/or 2) a helper to generate the full url and/or link. If Url.Action is returning the short-code version due to your routing configuration, I'd think a good place to start would be the second option, creating a helper/extension method that will generate the full url for you.
Here's how I solved this:
Instead of naming a route with short code to point to the action url, I made the route point to a different Controller action which would then redirect to the actual route that I want it to.
For e.g.: Originally I had the code "power" defined in the route table such that it would point to www.mysite.com/Power/Home.
Now instead of pointing it to that action - Index, controller - Home, area - Power, I make it resolve to: action - Power, Controller - Home, Area - ShortCode.
In the controller now, I simply do a RedirectToAction("Index", "Home", new { Area = "Power" });
This ensures that the actual links to /Power/Home do not resolve to the shortcode "power".
This is a simple fix increased the work by a little bit, but works like a charm.

ASP NET MVC: Dynamically adding or removing inputs on the form - unobtrusive validation

Before starting, I do have a very particular question and if you want to answer it go straight to the end. But I do welcome comments and advices hence the lengthy post.
OK, we deal with a lot of forms and some of these forms are quite lengthy and have many fields. We also have a requirement - in addition to top level fields - to be able to have variable number of repating rows - as we call them. For example, let's think of a customer which has name, surname and age while it can have zero or many addresses (say 0 to 10) so the user must be able to add or remove contacts from the form while filling it in. So typically user gets and "Add" button to add more addresses and next to each address, a delete button. Potentially there could be more than one repeating section in the same form but I am not going there. The point is, because of legal and historical reasons, all the forms must be saved at once so while the forms can be edited, we cannot accept a half-filled form and have another page for users to add and remove addresses, e.g.
I am using ASP NET MVC 2 (strongly typed views with a single generic controller) with client side validation and heavy jquery scripting for flashy features. We are probably going to migrate to ASP NET MVC 3 very soon and I am already playing with 3 for finding a good solution. These addresses are defined on the Model as List<Address>, e.g.
I currently have a working solution for this issue but I am not satisfied with it: I have an HTML Helper that names the add or delete buttons and a bit of JavaScript to disable validation and allow the form to be posted back (even invalid) and since I can find out the name of the button that was clicked, I have all the necessary logic to handle add or delete and works really well.
But I am posting back and the form is reloaded and I am looking for an aletrnative solution. Here are what I can do:
Do everything in the client side. "Add" button will clone one of such addresses and "Delete" button will remove() the element. I only have to rename the indexes which I have done. We were using jquery calendar and it was breaking on the new elements which I have also fixed. But the validation is not working which can probably work with ASP NET MVC but this solution looks like a very brittle one - a house of card which looks great before you add another card.
Post the whole page usin Ajax and then load it back again: This is probably better than my current solution but only slightly.
Use ajax to post the form and get back JSON and use the data to build the elements or remove them: Again a house of card because of extensive client side scripting
Serialize the form and post using Ajax to a particular action and get back only the repating section (as a partial view). The action on the controller can be reused and called from the view itself to return the partial view
OK last one is the one I am working on but there is an issue. ASP NET MVC 3 with unobtrusive validation works only if the form is engulfed in a BeginForm() while my top level view has a BeginForm() but not my partial view. It works well when I call it from the view but not on the ajax call to get just the repeating section.
(Question)
So is there a way to tell ASP NET MVC 3 to spit out validation data atttributes regardless being in a BeginForm() block?? To be honest if this is not a bug, this is definitely an important feature request. I have in fact used reflector to disassemble the code and the condition seems to be there.
Short Answer:
Add this to the partial view:
if (ViewContext.FormContext == null)
{
ViewContext.FormContext = new FormContext();
}
I don't think it is possible using the default unobtrusive libraries supplied. If you look at jquery.validate.js and jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js it looks like it only validates what is inside the form.
There's a few posts about it if Googled and a few work arounds.
I had a similar issue (although much simpler) where I had a validation summary at the top of the page and multiple forms but the unobtrusive javascript would only populate the view summary if its inside the form (jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js line 39 if interested...).
I'm not sure if the validation library is extendible but most things in jquery are so that might be an option if you want to go down that road.
As far a possible solution to your problem I'll put in my 2 cents for whats its worth.
You could have two actions that are posted to. The first action is you post your model with no js validation and all validation is handled in the code - this will catch all user with javascript turned off.
Your second action is you serialized the model. In mvc 3 using the Ajax.BeginForm has an AjaxOption for Url where you can specify an action for the jquery to call (where it serializes the form form you and you can decorate your action with your strongly typed model). Here you can check the model and return a json result and handle this in the javascript.

ASP.NET MVC Multiple Layout

I have a website that will contain 2 type of layout.
With no columns
With 2 columns
Header, footer and lots of other parts are the same for both, but inside the main content, there 2 separate layouts and I'd like to choose between 2 site masters. How would I go about accomplishing this?
I was thinking about making a main site master and have the one with the 2 column inherit from that. If that is the correct method, what are the keywords to google for, or you are free to explain inheriting site masters here.
Thank you,
Master pages can inside a master page themselves just like any other view. Just specify the master's MasterPageFile directive as usual:
<%# Master Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/App.Master"
Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>
Your views can choose to use the overall master page or the nested one as their masters.
Alternately, you can set the MasterPage of your views dynamically in several ways. The regular View() method has an overload to specify the master page:
return View("SomePage", "MasterPageFileHere");
or even better would be to specify an action method to do it for you globally. You can see a good walkthrough of that here.

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