>Hi Everyone,
>
>My development team and I are kind of new to programming with JSP, Java, XSL, XML, and Oracle. We are in the process of designing a system using JDeveloper and BC4J, and I had a few questions on the best approach to take for several items.
>
>Firstly, our system is going to have a quite a few drop down objects and we need to know the most efficient way of filling those lists. Should we hard code the drop downs in the XSL file or should be store them in XML files? We want to stay away from storing all these values in the database to avoid round trips to the server and ultimately using up more resources. We want to keep it at the middle tier.
>

Storing them in the database is the way to go. You can avoid round trips by caching them. The way you do this is you have a singleton class with a static HashMap on it and you store whatever you need to have cached. If you update any of the lookups all you need to do is drop the cache and you're good to go.

>Secondly, we are also going to be using several multi-select objects throughout our system. We were thinking of using a similar control that alot of wizards use... Two list boxes with the ability to move items to and from those boxes. However, we are confused on how we should store those multi-selects in our database. How does one go about this?
>

Multi selects are stored with a link table, that has a key of both tables.

>Finally, are there any advantages to having multiple packages within one system or project?
>

Your packaging structure should help you organize your code usually the main package is the the companies url com.companyname.systemname.subpackage
Putting everything in one package is the same as if you would put all your files on your harddrive in one folder.... The package name is part of the object name so if you want to have objects with the same name you'll have to put them in different packages.

>I would greatly appreciate any input or suggestions on how any of you may be currently doing the things that I'm asking about. Your successes and failures... Thanks in advance.
>
>Jolene