Single Form with Multiple Dynamic Buttons
- by John Reilly
I've spent hours/days trying to figure this out and now I'm completely perplexed so I thought I'd give stackoverflow a try. I'm (a newb) working in Java/JSP using Eclipse hosting on Google App Engine trying to develop an app for a volunteer organization I'm a member of. Rather than embarrass myself by showing my current code I'd love just a nudge in the right direction.
I have a form (which doubles as a report basically) showing "people" grouped under the "task" they are currently working on. I would like to select multiple people from multiple tasks and reassign them to another task e.g. Bill and Jane are Gardening, Jeff is Painting. I want to select Jane and Jeff (all people have an associated checkbox in the form) and re-assign them to Sweeping (which is a task on the form but has no people assigned to it yet).
Ideally, the re-assignment to Sweeping would be via a Sweeping button (each task would have a dynamically-created task button) that would pass the "Sweeping" value to a servlet along with an array or list of people whose checkbox has been checked. The servlet would handle the request (creating an Assignment "object/entity" with timeStamp, personId, taskId) and then re-direct back to the form/report which would then repaint with the current tasks/people generated from the Assignments class in the datastore.
All the tasks are user-defined and retrieved from the database when building the form. Ditto the people. I've been trying to keep the jsp for presentation and the servlets for the processing but I'm no purist and would just like to get unstuck. Many thanks in advance for your assistance.