Last week, I was required to quickly do maintenance to an ancient JSP page. The page basically is a spaghetti code that retrieve shipment data from Oracle, transform it into HTML output. The page itself is residing in an old Allaire JRun server. So yeah, it’s really that ancient 🙂

Due to the time constraint and my lack of familiarity with the overall Java EE environment, I decided to move it into my comfort zone 😀

To create the overall layout, we can always derive from Ext.NET MVC project. So I made a few changes and I have something like this:

When the user clicked the Search button, we need to submit to backend processing and show the output in the Result panel.

<ext:Button Width="100" Height="20" runat="server" ID="btnSearch" Text="Search">
	<Listeners>
		<Click Fn="fnSearch" />
	</Listeners> 
</ext:Button>

The click event handler is in JavaScript:

var fnSearch = function(sender, ev) {
   pnlResult.load({
	url:'/Job/Search', 
	params:{shipref: txtShipRef.getValue()}, 
	callback:function(el){
		el.applyStyles("overflow:scroll"); 
	}, 
	text:'loading...',
	timeout:30
   });
}

Meanwhile at the backend, JobController.cs will have the following the action handler:

public ContentResult Search(String shipref)
{
	var res = new ContentResult();
	res.ContentType = "text/html";
	var sb = new StringBuilder();
	try
	{    	
	    //Convert the Java code in JSP page into C# code	    		
	    //Highly recommended to use sb.Append() 
	    //instead of + operator for String concatenating
	    res.Content = sb.ToString();	
	}
	catch (Exception ex) {
		res.Content = ex.ToString();
	}
	return res;
}

There you go, at least now we can move this application to a newer and better server. Which should translates as a better experience to the user 😀

I hope it helps. Cheers!