How to make Struts and Prototype work better together?

Question

Prototype library uses $('element-id') or $F('element-id') to get the element or value of a form element. This is very convenient to code in javascript. But in Struts, I find there is no way to define an id attribute for a form element.

Although i can use

<html:xhtml/>

to define a form tag with id attribute as follows:

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-bean" prefix="bean" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-html" prefix="html" %>

<html:xhtml/> 

<html:form action="/Welcome">
...
<html:text property="username" size="16" maxlength="18"/>
...
</html:form>

The above rendered html is like this:

<form id="TestForm" method="post" action="/myapp/Welcome.do">
...
<input type="text" name="username" size="16" maxlength="18"/>
...
</form>

But what i need is to let struts render the

<html:text>

tag like this:

<input type="text" id="username" name="username" size="16" maxlength="18"/>

So is it possible in Struts to realize that? Or if not, how can i make it better to code in Prototype lib for Struts application?

I am using Struts 1.3.8; Prototype 1.5.1.

Answer 1

You can use the styleId attribute on most Struts widgets to set the HTML element id:

<html:text styleId="myId" .../>

renders as

<input type="text" id="myId" .../>