Appendix C: Known Problems and Issues

This document is under construction.

There are several known issues with the current state of JSP integration with Bebop, and JSP in general.

• Since a slave page might be a separate, full-fledged Page object from its master page, there may be conflicts between state management in the two because they take their state from the same set of URL variables. This may manifest itself in a variety of different ways.

  • You could get an error message on posting a form because an activated slave-page component specified in the URL variables will not exist in the master page.

  • If a master and slave page both contain a form, and a user clicks on a "submit" widget on the master page's form, then any state on the contained slave page will not propagate to the next request.

  • There is no opportunity for form-variable name-rewriting to resolve conflicts between widgets with the same names.

  The solution to this problem might lie in finding an alternative mechanism, besides URL/form variables, to maintain state between requests. Also, another workaround involves constructing a master and slave page as a single Page object by using compile-time includes:

  <define:page name="p" title="Test Page"> <%@ include file="master-define-header" %> ... page definition ... <%@ include file="master-define-footer" %> </define:page> <show:page> <%@ include file="master-header" %> ... page contents ... <%@ include file="master-footer" %> </show:page>

• The JSP 1.1 spec is broken because you can't include a page with <jsp:include> within a custom tag (for example, <show:page>). This should be fixed in JSP 1.2. The workaround is using the JSP static <%@ include file %> directive.

• You can't change the status code or request headers (for example, for redirect or sending an error message) from an included page. A page is "included" (as opposed to "forwarded") if it is executed with jsp:include or pageContext.include().

• When you statically include another JSP with <%@ include file= ... %>, modifications to the included file will not trigger a JSP recompile. You can manually trigger a recompile by touching the main JSP.