After much googling and head-scratching, I finally have an html:options tag working on
a jsp. The problem is that I don't know why one component of the solution is needed,
and I was hoping someone can explain it to me.
My ActionForm subclass, EditDeForm, has a pair of methods to provide the option list
as part of the form bean:
public Collection getNumFmtOptions() {
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
list.add(new LabelValueBean("None", "0"));
list.add(new LabelValueBean("Comma separated", "1"));
list.add(new LabelValueBean("Currency", "2"));
return list;
}
public void setNumFmtOptions(Collection options) {
// No op, here to satisfy bean-ness.
}
The jsp page contains an html:form section linked via action mapping to the EditDeForm
type. In it, there is a select/options section that looks like this:
<html:select property="numFmt">
<html:options collection="numFmtOptions"
property="value"
labelProperty="label"/>
</html:select>
I had thought that this would be enough to make it work. The html:options is in the
context of an html:form that knows about the current form bean, and the form bean has
a property numFmtOptions that contains what is needed to populate the options list.
But when I tried just this, I got a "cannot find bean" error on numFmtOptions.
The googling mentioned above finally revealed that I had to add this at the top of my
jsp:
<bean:define id="numFmtOptions"
name="editDeForm"
property="numFmtOptions"
type="java.util.Collection"/>
My question is: Why? What is this additional definition for? What information does
it supply that isn't already available to html:options inside the html:form context?
I'm happy that I have my code working, but I'd be even happier if I knew why it's
working. :)
--
Craig Berry
Principal Architect
PortBlue Corp.
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