creating POJO

[GameOne]

Hi

I am new to Spring framework and a newbie in Java too. I am having an issue that I want to solve.

In my object, which I want to display on the front end, there are few properties which have multiple values. For example, for a person, his country and state. As these properties values which can be displayed as a drop down list, I am not able to figure out how to implement them such that I can display them on the front end.

Do I need to create another object? or, is there any other way possible.
How do I do it?

Please help

[Arthur Loder]

Hi GameOne,

Not sure if I completely understand your question, but if an object can have multiple values and you want to display them, I would think you would want some Collection object (probably either a List or a Set) reference in the object. For example, assuming that a Person can have multiple Countries:

public class Person {

   private Set<Country> countries;

   public Set<Country> getCountries() {
      return this.countries;
   }

   public void setCountries(Set<Country> countries) {
      this.countries = countries;
   }

}

Then in your view page, iterate over the Collection. The following code is taken from the PetClinic sample application's war/WEB-INF/jsp/visitForm.jsp file:

<B>Previous Visits:</B>
<TABLE border="true">
  <TH>Date</TH><TH>Description</TH>
  <c:forEach var="visit" items="${visit.pet.visits}">
    <c:if test="${!visit.new}">
      <TR>
        <TD><fmt:formatDate value="${visit.date}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd"/></TD>
        <TD><c:out value="${visit.description}"/></TD>
      </TR>
    </c:if>
  </c:forEach>
</TABLE>

In the above case, the view is iterating over a pet's Set of Visits.

So by having a Set of Country objects in a Person, you can then iterate over the Countries in your view via: person.countries. There are other issues, such as how to provide the Person object to the view for outputting, but that is a different story.

If this did not answer your question, please re-post.

-Arthur Loder